NATIONAL
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NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
PUURACA ER
CONTENTS
| PROOF
When Art Sounds
a Climate Warning
In bubbles captured by
ice on Alaska lakes and
ponds, a photographer
found inspiration—and
sobering evidence—
of climate change.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
RYOTA KAJITA
|EXPLORE
THE BIG IDEA
Finding Our Way
to the Future
A Cosmos author's plea:
Let’s take what scien-
tists tell us to heart.
BY ANN DRUYAN
DECODER
Microbial Art
Agar helps scientists
grow microbes in labs.
It’s also a canvas for
unconventional art.
BY JENNIFER TSANG
ALSO
e A Giant Among Geodes
e What Vikings Consumed
¢ Mudskipper Parenting
| MARCH 2020
On the Cover
Mountains of wool and
cast-off clothes in this
Prato, Italy, facility are
sorted by color, cleaned,
processed, and used to
make new clothing.
LUCA LOCATELLI
| TRAVEL
GETTING THERE
Sacred Heights
Visiting the mountain
monasteries of
Meteora, Greece, is
worth the steep climb.
BY DANIEL STONE
CLOSER LOOK
Bike Between Parks
on Kokopelli’s Trail
A backcountry path
runs 142 miles through
“big, wild country”
in the western U.S.
BY AARON GULLEY
ALSO
e Coral Recovery: How
Travelers Can Help
e Gardeners’ Guide
FEATURES
The End of Trash
“To get along on this
Earth,” National Geo-
graphic’s senior envi-
ronment editor writes,
“we must do just one
thing: Stop wasting so
much of it.” That’s the
goal of advocates of
a circular economy—
one that would extract
value from most of the
trash we now discard.
BY ROBERT KUNZIG
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
LUCA LOCATELLI
The Secrets of Bees
Observing a wild nest
of honeybees reveals
tricks to their survival.
BY JASON BITTEL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
INGO ARNDT
Feeeniareensalahnenweencdebeeteanes P. 72
Chibok Schoolgirls
These Nigerian kid-
napping survivors are
reclaiming their future.
BY NINA STROCHLIC
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
BENEDICTE KURZEN
A
Culture, or Abuse?
Questions surround
the treatment of
Japanese macaques.
BY RENE EBERSOLE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JASPER DOEST
Trailblazers
The accomplishments
of groundbreaking
women light up
National Geo-
graphic’s history.
BY NINA STROCHLIC
MARCH WHAT'S COMING
=
-
oe
ge ~*
~
NAT GEO WILD
Enjoy the Critter
Fixers TV debut
Veterinarians Vernard
Hodges and Terrence
Ferguson have been
classmates, partners in
an animal hospital—and
now they're co-stars
of a show about their
work. Critter Fixers:
Country Vets premieres
February 23 at 10/9c
on Nat Geo WILD.
NAT GEO LIVE
Experience an
era When Women
Ruled the World
A Nat Geo Live event
may be coming toa
venue near you. This
month, learn about
ancient queens with
Egyptologist Kara
Cooney, author of
When Women Ruled
the World. See sched-
ules at nationalgeo
graphic.com/events.
BACK-ISSUES STORE
Looking for a special
magazine issue?
Shop online at our
National Geographic
back-issues store, to
find a favorite issue of
our magazines or to fill
A out your collection. For
single copies of most
issues back to the first
par Join the exploration of fn fae (below) contest
GEO
ww Cosmos: Possible Worlds Customer Service at
natgeo.com/backissues.
Television’s most watched science show returns
March 9. Cosmos: Possible Worlds, created and
executive produced by Ann Druyan and hosted by
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, continues the
legacy that Carl Sagan began more than 40 years ago.
Episodes transport viewers across space and time
with one-of-a-kind animations (above), holograms,
and reenactments of world-altering discoveries.
Subscriptions For subscriptions or changes of ad- Contributions to the National Geographic Society are tax deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code.
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IMAGINING
‘THE END
OF TRASH’
FROM THE EDITOR
| MARCH
The Promise of a
Circular Economy
BY SUSAN GOLDBERG
WE FEEL BAD when we throw out things
that shouldn’t have become trash (like
uneaten, past-its-prime produce) or
expend resources needlessly (like leav-
ing lights on when we’re away). This
guilty feeling is deeply ingrained; the
origins of the expression “waste not,
want not” can be traced to the 1500s.
But we do waste, in ways big and
small. The result is this shocking fact:
Of the minerals, fossil fuels, foodstuffs,
and other raw materials that we take
from the Earth and turn into products,
about two-thirds ends up as waste. And,
more likely than not, that waste is part
of a larger environmental problem.
“Plastic trash drifted into rivers and
oceans; so did nitrates and phosphates
leaching from fertilized fields. A third
of all food rotted, even as the Ama-
zon was deforested to produce more,”
writes senior environment editor Rob-
ert Kunzig in “The End of Trash,” the
cover story in this issue. And the biggest
waste-caused problem? Climate change
is what happens when “we burn fossil
fuels and scatter the waste—carbon
dioxide—into the atmosphere.”
What if we could recapture waste
and turn it into something else? This
concept, called the circular economy,
, -&
Sg?
N
ar, Tit A he
Sorc de
‘Se
is not entirely new. Environmental-
ists have espoused the reduce, reuse,
recycle ethos since the 1970s. For
generations, in Prato, Italy, old wool
sweaters have been reduced to their
yarn and rewoven into new clothes.
And for decades, copper was extracted
from church bells and statues; today
it’s more likely to come from iPhones
and flat-screens.
We sent Kunzig and photographer
Luca Locatelli to document where the
new circular economy is taking hold.
They found a lot of examples. In New
York, fungi filaments are used to create
compostable packaging. In London,
researchers are feeding beer waste to
insects, which are made into animal
feed. In hotel kitchens around the
world, chefs are reducing food waste
with AI garbage cans that measure it.
The idea that we might put an end to
trash may seem far-fetched—anzd it is,
but in a good way, Kunzig told me. “It
reminds me of a line in Diner, a movie
I love: ‘If you don’t have good dreams,
you got nightmares. The circular econ-
omy is like that—it’s a dream we have
to try to make real.”
Thank you for reading National
Geographic.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCA LOCATELLI
At this Prato, Italy, facility,
bundles of discarded textiles
will be processed and used
to create new clothing—
an example of the circular
economy in action.
Since 2010, Ryota Kajita
has photographed
patterns that occur both
WT ate (-Vaal-¥-]4eM-lavem-1 Ke) ©)
the layers of ice over
Alaska’s rivers, lakes,
swamps, and ponds.
8 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
LOOKING
AT THE
EARTH
FROM
EVERY
POSSIBLE
ANGLE
PROOF
” NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
VOL. 237 NO. 3
~ WHAT THE ICE
CAPTURES
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
RYOTA KAJITA
Bi atom olatvolnote]e-le)al-lari-\-rmlalaaieleliare|
designs—and concerning markers
fo) Moll Inat-)a-Molal-Jale [tei cey4-lam lalcom aa)
ice in Alaska’s interior.
MARCH 2020 9
PROOF
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Kajita described the science behind the images in his project, Ice Formations, for the digital gallery
Life-Framer.com: “Many of the formations are frozen bubbles of gases such as methane and carbon
10 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
dioxide trapped under ice. When water freezes, it turns into ice slowly from the surface and traps the
gases,” creating unique geometric patterns. Frost and snow crystals on the ice add another dimension.
MARCH 2020 11
The under-ice formations he has photographed range from 10 to 30 inches in diameter, Kajita says.
Though he likes how they look, he’s concerned about what they signify. “Because methane gas is
12 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
considered one of the fundamental causes of greenhouse effects,” he explains, “scientists in Alaska are
researching these frozen bubbles in relation to the global climate change.”
MARCH 2020 = 13
PROOF
TH BACKSTORY
A PHOTOGRAPHER SEES BUBBLES UNDER THE ICE THAT ARE
VISUALLY STRIKING-—AND A MARKER OF CLIMATE CHANGE.
YEAR AFTER YEAR, as autumn in Alaska
is ending, Ryota Kajita goes looking
for winter’s first ice. A Japanese-born
photographer living in Fairbanks,
Kajita believes that “everything—even
if it appears to be insignificant—
connects to larger aspects of our Earth.”
An example, he says, is the ice, after
it has frozen over ponds and lakes but
before it’s been obscured by snow.
Kajita has been shooting photos
through the ice since 2010 for his
project, Ice Formations. He’s capti-
vated by the geometric patterns he
sees: fizzy fields of bubbles under the
“The window of time to find ice patterns is brief,” says Kajita, “because all surfaces on the ground will
be covered once snow falls.”
frozen surface, and snow and ice crys-
tals dusted across it. Many photos are
compositions of trapped, frozen bub-
bles of methane and carbon dioxide.
Though Kajita loves to photograph
the formations, their existence worries
him. As Earth’s northern regions warm,
the melting of permafrost accelerates.
That releases more methane, a harmful
greenhouse gas.
Kajita hopes people who see the
photos will “feel connected to nature”—
and that connection will help them
“face bigger issues, like global climate
change.” —PATRICIA EDMONDS
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IN THIS SECTION
A Giant Geode
E xX P L O R E Microbial Art
Mudskipper Parenting
Arctic Racing
ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 237 NO. 3
Finding Our Way
to the Future
THE MOST AMBITIOUS SCIENTIFIC MISSION MAY BE TO INSPIRE
HUMANITY TO ACT, SAYS THE AUTHOR, A CO-CREATOR OF COSMOS.
BY ANN DRUYAN
IT WAS A RAINY NIGHT when the future became a
place, one you could visit. A downpour at sunset
couldn’t discourage the 200,000 people who had
gathered for the opening ceremony of the 1939 New
York World’s Fair. “World of Tomorrow” was the
theme of this art deco land of promise.
There were television sets, calculating machines,
and a robot. For the first time, people saw these things
that would change their lives. But on that night
they had come to hear the greatest scientific genius
since Isaac Newton. Albert Einstein was to give brief
remarks and flip the switch that would illuminate the
fair. The spectacle promised to be the largest flash of
artificial light in technical history, visible for a radius
of 40 miles. A wow—but not as mind-blowing as the
source of this sudden, unprecedented brilliance.
Scientists would capture cosmic rays and transmit
them to Queens, where they would supply the energy
that would turn night into day, flooding with blinding
MARCH 2020 17
EXPLORE } £THE BIG IDEA
FROM NASA’S HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, AN IMAGE OF NEW STAR CREATION IN THE ORION CONSTELLATION, SOME 1,350 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH
PHOTO: NASA/ESA, G. BACON, L. FRATTARE, Z. LEVAY, F. SUMMERS (VIZ3D TEAM, STSCI)
light a new world made possible by science.
It fell to Einstein to explain cosmic rays. He was
instructed to keep it to five minutes. Initially he
refused. That wouldn’t possibly be enough time to
explain this mysterious phenomenon. But he wasa
true believer in the scientist’s duty to communicate
with the public. And so he agreed.
As the sun was setting, Einstein stepped to the
microphone. He had just turned 60 and had enjoyed
decades of the rarest form of iconic celebrity, a
renown based on his discoveries of new physical
realities on the grandest possible scale. Those who
stood there in the rain to hear him were only a frac-
tion of those who listened to the event on radio.
“If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly
and fully,” he began, “its achievements must enter
not only superficially but with their inner meaning
into the consciousness of people.”
When I discovered Einstein’s rarely quoted words,
I found the credo for 40 years of my life’s work. This
always has been and always will be the dream of Cos-
mos. Einstein was urging us to tear down the walls
around science that have excluded and intimidated
so many of us—to translate scientific insights from
the technical jargon of its priesthood into the spo-
ken language shared by us all, so that we may take
these insights to heart and be changed by a personal
encounter with the wonders they reveal.
We didn’t know that particular Einstein quote
when Carl Sagan and I began writing the original
Cosmos with astronomer Steve Soter. We just felt a
kind of evangelical urgency to share the awesome
power of science, to convey the spiritual uplift of
the universe it reveals, and to amplify the alarms
that Carl, Steve, and other scientists were sounding
about our impact on the planet. Cosmos gave voice
to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with
hope, with a sense of human self-esteem derived,
in part, from our successes in finding our way in the
universe and from the courage of those scientists
who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths.
The original award-winning television series and
book of 1980 were embraced by hundreds of millions
of people. The Library of Congress included the book
as one of 88 in an exhibition called “Books That
Shaped America.” So it was with a fair degree of fear
that I set out with Steve, a dozen years after Carl’s
death, to undertake Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey.
Now on my third series of voyages on the Ship of the
Imagination, I once again have brilliant collabora-
tors, andI am still worried about not measuring up.
Despite this, the times impel me forward.
We all feel the chill our present casts on our future.
Some part of us knows that we must awaken to action
or doom our children to dangers and hardships we
ourselves have never had to face. How do we rouse
ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate
or nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed
before it has destroyed us and countless other spe-
cies? How do we learn to value those things we cannot |
Watch Cosmos: Possible Worlds
Created and executive produced by Ann Druyan
and hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson,
the third season of the series Cosmos: Possible
Worlds transports viewers across space and time
with animations, holograms, and reenactments
of world-altering discoveries. The series pre-
mieres March 9 on National Geographic.
live without—air, water, the sustaining fabric of life
on Earth, the future—more than we prize money and
short-term convenience? Nothing less than a global
spiritual awakening can transform us.
Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence,
to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully
alive. Love asks us to get beyond our personal hopes
and fears, to embrace another’s reality. This is pre-
cisely the way science loves nature. This lack of a final
destination, an absolute truth, is what makes science
such a worthy methodology for sacred searching. It
is a never-ending lesson in humility. The vastness
of the universe—and love, the thing that makes the
vastness bearable—is out of reach to the arrogant.
What’s real must matter more to us than what we
wish to believe. But how do we tell the difference?
I know a way to part the curtains of darkness that
prevent us from having a complete experience of
nature. Here it is, the basic rules of the road for sci-
ence: Test ideas by experiment and observation.
Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones
that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And
question everything, including authority.
If pilgrimages toward understanding our circum-
stances in the universe, the origin of life, and the
laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t
know what could be. I’m not a scientist, just a hunter-
gatherer of stories. The ones I treasure most are
about the searchers who have helped us find our
way in the great dark ocean and the islands of light
they left to us.
The misuse of science endangers our civiliza-
tion, but science also has redemptive powers. It
can cleanse a planetary atmosphere overburdened
with carbon dioxide. It can set life free to neutralize
the toxins that we have scattered so carelessly. Its
unrivaled powers of prophecy are demonstrated by
our current predicament.
The words Einstein spoke on that rainy night
might prove to be among his most important gifts
to us. If we take what the scientists are telling us to
heart, a conscious and motivated public can will this
possible world into existence. O
Writer-director-producer Ann Druyan was cre-
ative director of NASA‘s Voyager message project
that sent sounds and images into space on golden
disks. This essay is drawn from her new book, Cos-
mos: Possible Worlds. Druyan has won Emmy and
Peabody Awards for her contributions to National
Geographic's renowned television series Cosmos.
MARCH 2020 19
If we lose our
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-_-
HREE DAYS AFTER THE MILL BURNED DOWN,
Aaron Feuerstein, then 70 and white-haired, stood
before his workers. It was just before Christmas, 1995,
and Malden Mills employees were braced for the
worst. With the insurance settlement, Feuerstein
could presumably have closed the business and retired
quite comfortably. But he announced that he would
rebuild—and keep every worker on the payroll. It was
reported that everyone wept, including the news crews.
Feuerstein had good reason to be confident, even
standing in the ashes of his mill. In 1981, his team of
engineers had developed a dense polyester fabric that
stayed warm when wet and dried quickly. It was the
first synthetic alternative to wool insulation. They
called it PolarFleece’. Years later, Time magazine would
name fleece one of the 100 best inventions of the
20th century.
The brand that invented synthetic fleece is now called
Polartec, and it has expanded the limits of outdoor
exploration. “What people have accomplished wouldn't
have been possible if we'd stopped innovating at
wool,” says David Karstad, creative director and vice
president of marketing at Polartec, which has recently
been acquired by Milliken & Company.
Polartec didn't stop innovating at fleece, either.
In the mid-90s, the company turned its attention
to environmental sustainability, and pioneered the
process to knit recycled polyester yarn made from
plastic water bottles into performance fabrics.
In 1993, the brand collaborated with Patagonia to
design and manufacture the first-ever recycled
polyester fleece.
Since then, Polartec has diverted about 1.5 billion
plastic bottles from landfills and manufactured
more than 200 styles with a minimum of 50 percent
recycled content. The goal is to reach 100 percent
recycled content across all products.
ADVERTORIAL FOR MILLIKEN
But according to Polartec President Steve Layton,
these days recycled content is table stakes.
The next level of sustainable manufacturing
is circularity—polyester products made from
recycled content that can themselves be recycled.
“That's going to be the key moving forward,” says
Layton. “To be able to take a Polartec sweatshirt at
the end of its life and put it in the recycling bin, the
same as a plastic bottle—that’s the ultimate goal.”
Now that Milliken has acquired Polartec, that level of
innovation is even more promising. Layton, a longtime
Milliken leader tapped to head the Polartec business in
June, says the acquisition paves the way for scientific
advancement in recycled performance textiles.
“| get excited when | think about how many material
scientists and engineers we have in research and
development within Milliken,” he says. “Our plastics
team has already made some important strides in
[recycling] polypropylene. Hopefully we can apply
it to polyesters and go from there.”
He reveals that dedicated teams of material scientists
and engineers at Milliken are working on different
areas of sustainability for the Polartec brand. They're
developing fabric with recycled content, researching
biodegradable fabrics, and looking into combining
synthetic fibers and hemp. “There's a lot of great
energy behind it,” says Layton.
A quarter century after the invention of recycled
fleece, Polartec is well-positioned to keep leading on
sustainable fabrics. “We can't solve the intractable
problems created over the last hundred years of
industrial apparel-making, but we can certainly
change how it impacts the planet going forward,”
says Karstad. “If any industry can do it, it’s the
outdoor industry, because it’s dependent on having
an outdoors to explore.” After a beat, he says: “If we
lose our snowcapped mountains, how will we shred?”
This content was created for Milliken. It does not necessarily reflect the views of National Geographic or its editorial staff.
ADVERTORIAL FOR MILLIKEN
PHOTOS, TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT
Professional backcountry skier Baker Boyd
tests the latest Polartec fabric prototypes.
Quality control is a hands-on process at
Polartec’s finishing plant in Cleveland, Tenn.
ISX =Yen el (Xe f=] 0) g (et 01-44] a -IoM} ele) 0) VZ-T a * .
made from recycled plastic waste.
An employee takes a break at Polartec's
Raschel Knitting facility in Hudson, N.H.
LEARN MORE AT MILLIKEN.COM
Milliken, Polartec, and PolarFleece names and marks are trademarks of Milliken & Company.
EXPLORE | BREAKTHROUGHS
The grand master workout
Though chess is hardly a strenuous
sport, its grand masters experience
DISPATCHES physical costs on a par with those faced
by more active athletes. Because of the
FROM THE FRONT LINES human body's response to the stress of
OF SCIENCE elite play, chess professionals
AND INNOVATION can burn up to 6,000 calo-
ries a day in tournaments,
a Stanford University re-
searcher says. -ANNIE ROTH
re.
ETHNOBOTANY
Did this plant
help Vikings
lose control?
The English word
f ® ian. ae * ~ “berserk” is derived
P > . from berserkers,
*
> ‘ 4 “ee
h
violent Vikings said
tO Consume some-
thing that induced
rage before battle.
Historians have
= — : long assumed
| J : “= = that fly agaric,
< % a hallucinogenic
s . : - mushroom, was the
a. \ 3 ny berserkers’ drug
of choice. But now
ethnobotanist
Karsten Fatur says
Vikings likely took
henbane (below).
Geologist Milagros Carretero sits inside the Pulpi Geode, one of the world’s largest geodes.
GEOLOGY :
The plant is
A GIANT AMONG GEODES Boe Cua
Scandinavia than fly
SCIENTISTS ARE WORKING ON THE RECIPE FOR THIS agaric, he says, and
SPANISH SITE'S ENORMOUS GYPSUM CRYSTALS. has compounds
with greater links
to aggression. —A.R.
ANY GEODE MIGHT MAKE US WONDER: What geologic forces
form these hollows lined with crystals? But the Pulpi Geode,
discovered in an abandoned Spanish mine, takes wonder to a
different scale. One of the world’s largest geodes, it’s an approx-
imately 390-cubic-foot cavity whose walls bristle with imposing
gypsum crystals, some nearly seven feet long. Now scientists
are hoping to uncover how these colossal crystals developed.
They seem to have been made by a very specific recipe: a
250-million-year-old supply of the mineral anhydrite, a climate
hospitable to crystal formation, and lots of water and time. In the
resulting chemical soup, larger crystals may have cannibalized
smaller ones to boost their own size, while swings in the local tem-
perature could have accelerated the crystal growth even further.
Though key chapters remain incomplete, this otherworldly
site now has a possible origin story. -ROBIN GEORGE ANDREWS
PHOTOS: JORGE GUERRERO, AFP/VIA GETTY IMAGES (GEODE); BOGNAR JANOS (HENBANE); ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
TURKISH
CRAFTSMANSHIP
goturkey.com
TURKISH
-
AIRLINES Andeer
ISTANBUL
EXPLORE
DECODER
ARI A
Agar evolved from
a kitchen ingredient
toa lab medium for
growing bacteria.
Now it’s the canvas
for artworks made
of microorganisms.
BY JENNIFER TSANG
ANGELINA HESSE, a Dutch-American
lab assistant and cook, suggested
in the 1880s that an ingredient in
jellies and puddings could be used
to grow bacteria. By finding that pur-
pose for agar, Hesse revolutionized
microbiology and set the stage fora
new art form.
In the laboratory, agar—a gelatinous
substance isolated from seaweed—is
paubb;cre my sluemelusComeleinelsslice-lelemnelod
heated to sterilize, and poured into
shallow dishes. When cooled, it thick-
ens into a smooth, semisolid surface
for bacteria to grow on—an upgrade
from the potatoes, meat extract, and
bread scientists were previously using.
More than a century after Hesse’s
work, agar is still at the center of bac-
terial cultivation. It has also become
HIGHLIGHTS
OF AGAR ART
The Agar Art Contest
proves that “scientists
absolutely can be cre-
ative,” says Katherine
Mo} pike) aro) mu al=w-Naat=)a ler] a)
Society for Microbiol-
role nan dal -mJ ole) ah yo) are) mal)
competition. Here, a
sample of 2019 entries;
see more at ngm.com/
itl) PACVAG)
to make.
22 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
This scene of a koi and a lotus
flower, which won first place
in the professional category,
imete) q@alial-mellai-1c-lal me) celal ans
ND GULTURES
an unconventional canvas for show-
casing microscopic organisms in all
their visual brilliance.
Some microbes create color natu-
rally. Different species of Streptomyces,
Mii ebCol ol oycorelerecacwaet-Veniaeymelevar-eis le) (oli
ics, come in pigments ranging from
reds and blues to black. E. coli is natu-
rally a beige color, but introduced genes
can make it or other microbes fluoresce
in bright pinks, greens, and blues. Invis-
ible when first applied to the agar, the
microbes multiply over time to reveal
patterns and colors.
Since 2015, the American Society
for Microbiology (ASM) has held the
annual Agar Art Contest to illuminate
this intersection between science and
art. Every year, says ASM’s Katherine
| Hoyelne)ereealracie-lelecnelsvee)aslommesleycce-velel
more intricate with it, incorporating
things like 3D agar and using spores
and all different kinds of organisms.”
IW GKecelolsccmciebace)enalembtce-l0muslsmabssley
but most are unseen. Agar art reveals
that invisible world, limited only by
the microbial palette and the creator’s
imagination. The contest is “a great
public outreach tool,” Lontok says, and
shows the often overlooked “beauty
and diversity of microbes.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg—aka RBG—
was painted on an agar known
as VRBG, the acronym for its
Col at-Tanl (er) mexo}any exe) al-Jal ace
Si
STAPH COLORS
Tas colelate man cekeyimal-14
pigments very close
at hand: “The white
bacteria, most likely
Staphylococcus epi-
dermidis, and the
yellow bacteria, most
likely Staphylococcus
aureus, were sourced
from my skin,” she says.
AN
UNDERSEA
led —3 | —ae}
PANCT AN 3
This artwork, “Marine
Universe,” was a finalist
in the professional cat-
egory of the 2019 ASM
contest. To compose
it, Princeton University
student Janie Kim used
nalrelgexelce alan emicelan)
numerous places.
This desert scene was made
of pathogens that cause uri-
nary tract infections in “water-
stressed regions like the Middle
East,” the artist says.
GROWING GREEN
Yellow S. aureus bac-
teria and blue E. coli
loystoun=}at- er] al ol-mnnlb.<qre|
to make green. Kim
ra appreciates how they
J “exist together to
create art, much
fi<-weat-Valats)
symbioses
themselves.”
lm oo} Kole) Ke) :4
A gene-regulating
LY-Yo]Ul-}ala-meolaid ce) om ale)
blue these E. coli bac-
i-Jat-M (ele) Cam idalate | hy Al
Kim says, the sequence
comes “from a marine
bacterium associated
with algae.”
Spreading backyard soil on Luminous in green and red, The 3D volcano is a mound of agar inoculated
agar to see what would grow, Bacillus subtilis containing with the mold Cladosporium cladosporioides,
one artist wound up with the introduced fluorescent roldleyeliaremudinameh4-tebr-lel-1al [-\A- Fal Mal-mt-Tale mS
purple and yellow shades to protein genes was used to Tanto) (os oe)c-\-yar- late Maal -meels-1e-1e-manl la cexelcel-al na
make this butterfly. make this tree. grown on a dyed-agar sea.
EXPLORE | BASIC INSTINCTS
FOR HIS
OFFSPRING,
THIS DAD
GIVES THE AIR
HE BREATHES
ROM MONCH OW al mG
THOMAS P. PESCHAK
STUDYING ELUSIVE FISH that dwell in dark mud chambers is no
easy feat. Thus the science of the many species of mudskippers
is incomplete—and some of what’s known is a bit odd. Example:
Mudskippers of one sort keep their protruding eyes moist by
retracting them deep into their sockets and then popping them out
again—hence the genus name Boleophthalmus, or “ejected eye.”
When it’s time for these amphibious fish to breed in the tropical
intertidal zones where some of them live, the male stages flamboy-
ant courtship displays, flaring his fins and leaping high into the
air. If a female’s impressed, she follows the male to a burrow for
procreation away from prying eyes. But thanks to an endoscope,
excavation tools, and patient research, Atsushi Ishimatsu of Japan’s
Nagasaki University and his team have pieced together a vision of
how mudskippers reproduce.
The male builds a burrow to serve as a nest. One or more shafts
Te Rvok- Ro ot-teele\sauet-lmell pe-las\vayslseRylio@eltimet-ce-KelsnlceneolG
ing to hold an air pocket. The female deposits eggs on the ceiling,
and the male fertilizes them. Once she departs, he tends the eggs
for their few days of gestation. To maintain the oxygen the eggs
need, the male will swim to the surface, gulp air, bring it back, and
exhale, over and over. Watching video that Ishimatsu made with
the endoscope, his colleague Karen L. M. Martin deduced that a
male might take “roughly 100 mouthfuls” to create the air bubble.
Then somehow, Martin says, the expectant male “keeps track of
tide and time”—and at the right moment, he begins gulping the
air in the burrow and blowing it out. Water pours in, triggering the
larvae to hatch; they swim up from the burrow and away. The male,
Martin says, is “really a very good papa.” —PATRICIA EDMONDS
A few dozen species of
mudskippers live in mangrove
and tidal-zone ecosystems
elcolelare maat-muveldremmiatel Urol lave]
on Kuwait's coast, where
it took veteran National
(€{—Yofe] ¢-] ealiom e)akeinexe|¢-) o)at=14
Thomas P. Peschak “many
hours of lying motionless in
id pX-wmaalele ino o) alel ete] e-le) ama al=
courtship rituals” of the fish.
JEFF
GOLDBLUM
3 QUESTIONS |!
Finding the Surprises
in Familiar Things
The World According to
Jeff Goldblum premieres
on Disney+ this spring.
For an extended version
of this interview, visit
www.nationalgeographic.
co.uk/jeffgoldblum.
PHOTO AND INTERVIEW: SIMON INGRAM
JEFF GOLDBLUM crackles with curi-
osity. Eyes wide, posture keen, mouth
agape, hand gestures expectant. It’s a
quality he’s leased to an array of wide-
eyed, reactor-brained characters in
films such as Jurassic Park, Indepen-
dence Day, and The Fly. Now the Penn-
sylvania-born actor and musician—a
man of 67 who, by his own admis-
sion, is “still four years old in many
respects”—is unleashing his eccentric
brand of curiosity in a new show for
National Geographic and Disney+.
He explores a suite of subjects: Poli-
tics, disease, and crime are out; bikes,
pools, and tattoos are in. It’s The World
According to Jeff Goldblum.
Your subjects—denim, gaming, ice
cream, barbecue—seem quite dispa-
rate but universal. Why these?
They’re eclectic, a mélange, a potpourri,
ashepherd’s pie, with many surprises.
I'd recently hosted three episodes of
a National Geographic show called
Explorer—and really loved them. That’s
how this show came about. We thought
we'd do familiar subjects in which we
might be able to find something unex-
pected: historic, scientific, and some-
thing of the human connection, our
own story, triggered by these things.
Are you curious about why you're
curious?
Having two kids, I am in a cycle of
particularly appetized curiosity. My
kids look around and they say, What is
this, why is this? Maybe it’s something
you pass down. Or maybe our species
has to be curious to be connected to
the world. While making this show, I
read these books by Yuval Noah Harari:
Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for
the 21st Century. As Harari says, larger
issues like climate change, the dangers
of nuclear proliferation, and technolog-
ical disruption can be solved only with
global cooperation. It was always true
that the only reason the human species
proliferated and flourished was that
we cooperated in groups and therefore
were curious about each other.
If you could time travel, who would
you want to meet?
I just started reading The Inven-
tion of Nature about Alexander von
Humboldt. They say more things are
named after him than anybody else.
He predicted climate change chal-
lenges, the unintended consequences
of civilization, the industrial revolu-
tion. I bet his would be a good brain
to pick. That’s kind of the show ina
nutshell: It’s me, not pretending to
know any more than I do, but getting
interested, talking to interesting peo-
ple who come from an unexpected
place, and having a curious and fun
encounter with them. And letting my
mind, such as it is, roam free. 0
EXPLORE
EXPLORE |§ THROUGH THE LENS
ho
e
—_
#3,
aR:
x
Pe A
» *
The Race Goes On
TRAVELING NORTH TO COVER A GRUELING
STORY AND
SLED DOG RACE, A PHOTOGRAPHER FINDS PHOTOGRAPHS
CLARITY IN THE ARCTIC AIR AND KINSHIP BY KATIE
WITH THE DOGS THAT DIDN’T FINISH. ORLINSKY
26 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was Offered a last-minute
assignment to photograph the Yukon Quest, a thou-
sand-mile sled dog race through the subarctic wil-
derness of Alaska and Canada. The race takes place
in the dead of winter along a route that was used
by sled dog teams during the gold rush to deliver
mail and supplies. The Yukon Quest is considered
one of the toughest sporting events on the planet:
Temperatures frequently reach minus 50°F, winds
can blow over 40 miles an hour, and the days are
so short that most of the race happens in the dark.
I did not know any of this before the assign-
ment. I’d never heard of the Yukon Quest or its
more famous counterpart in the United States, the
Iditarod. When I thought of the Arctic—ifI thought
about it at all—I pictured exotic endangered ani-
mals and a distant, cold place out of reach to me
as a photographer. It was a realm of rugged men
with salt-and-pepper beards who owned bright
orange camping gear and were raised by even more
rugged fathers who taught their sons life lessons
while hunting and fishing. My father was a theater
producer from New York City. I learned life lessons
backstage, not in the backcountry.
Even so, it’s surprising that the Arctic intimidated
me. I spent most of my 20s documenting conflict and
social issues in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin
America, focusing especially on Mexico and the drug
war. I was committed to telling stories no matter the
risk. Then in 20111 became part of a story—a tragedy—
in which the victims were my colleagues andI was a
survivor. In the aftermath I had a hard time finding
the inspiration I needed to love photography as I once
did. I kept working—I needed the money—but often
I was just going through the motions.
And so I took the assignment to photograph the
2014 Yukon Quest with no idea what to expect. A few
days later I was on a plane to Canada. We landed in
Whitehorse around midnight, the tarmac covered in
snow. When I touched my airplane window, I could
already feel the freezing cold air. I’d made it north;
my luggage had not. In it was everything I thought
I was going to need, including borrowed snow pants
that were too big for me, long underwear I hadn’t
worn since a high school ski trip, and a brand-new,
expensive puffy parka (I'd left the tag on so I could
return it once I got home). I was supposed to fly from
Whitehorse to Dawson City to photograph the race
first thing in the morning, and all I had was a gray
hoodie and a backpack full of camera equipment.
Inside the airport I explained my plight to the two
women behind the Air Canada desk. One of them
disappeared into the back office. She returned with
a navy blue Air Canada wool cardigan. The other
woman asked her husband to bring boots and a
jacket. She gave me her own gray down jacket, the
furry boots off her feet, and a pair of red fleece gloves.
It was still dark as I boarded the plane for Dawson
City later that morning. When the sun finally began
to rise, sweeping mountain ranges came into view.
They went on and on—jagged peaks of hot pink
and beige, mounds of gray and black, rolling hills of
endless white. I had never dreamed of a landscape
this magical and took pictures through the window
until a dense fog settled in.
As I got off the plane, the snow crunching beneath
my feet sparkled as if a million little children had
sprinkled it with all the glitter in the world. I spent
the ride to the hotel in silent awe as we drove by
lavender-tinted mountain ranges and frozen rivers
coated with a mosaic of blue and white ice. The entire
boreal forest was layered in what looked to me like
shimmering snow. I later learned that it’s called
hoarfrost—the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
MARCH 2020 27
EXPLORE |
THROUGH THE LENS
o AIRY
A day or two into her first trip north, Katie Orlinsky meets some
of the contenders in the 2014 Yukon Quest sled dog race during
their 36-hour mandatory stop in Dawson City, Canada.
It felt like another planet, a fairy tale. Some days I
wish I could go back in time just to experience my
first few hours in Dawson City again.
Meanwhile the cold was as brutal as the land was
beautiful. When I stepped outside, the air was so
dry I could barely breathe. But at that moment bor-
rowed clothes and the kindness of strangers were all
I needed for warmth. A feeling came over me that I
hadn’t experienced in a long time: As long as I had
my camera, everything would be OK. I wanted to
take pictures again.
I have been covering the Arctic, among other
places, ever since. The following year I returned
to the north to follow the Yukon Quest yet again,
this time on assignment for National Geographic.
I remember it was more than halfway through the
race when I flew to a checkpoint in Eagle, Alaska. A
pickup truck was waiting to take me and my fellow
passengers, mostly from Alaska media or race vol-
unteers, to our temporary sleeping quarters—the
floor of the local school library.
Before we drove away, I noticed a pair of race vet-
erinarians, identifiable by the medical patch on their
giant red parkas, loading what looked like heavy
potato sacks onto a small plane. Then I saw furry
heads with pointy ears sticking out of the sacks.
Immediately I asked the driver if he could wait, and
I rushed to photograph the scene. The vets told me
that these dogs had been dropped from their team.
The bags would keep them safe and calm while
flying home.
Sled dogs, considered by some to be the world’s
greatest endurance athletes, are bred to thrive in the
cold, snowy wilderness. Most mushers have trained
their dogs since they were puppies. Even so, during
such a long race, dropping dogs is acommon occur-
rence. Sometimes a dog is tired or it’s injured or it
seems to have simply lost interest in running. (One
year a dog got sick from eating the neon booties that
protected its feet.)
When a dog team hits its stride, it is a beautiful
sight to behold—paws tapping the snow like a soft
chorus, legs swinging in quiet rhythm, hot breath
leaving trails of billowing smoke that cluster like
clouds in the cold air. It makes it easy to forget that
every dog is different. Seeing the dropped dogs
separated individually—into sacks, no less—was a
stark reminder of this.
I spent the next few days focusing far more on
the dogs that were leaving the race than those that
might win it. The local media and race officials prob-
ably thought I was nuts. I thought my fascination
with dogs in sacks flying in airplanes was pretty
self-explanatory. Looking back, perhaps I also felt
connected to the dropped dogs. I could relate to
the idea of having a goal you'd worked toward your
whole life, only to have something happen that
changes your course.
Bad weather hit Eagle, and for days there were no
commercial flights. I was close to missing the finish
in Fairbanks on my first big National Geographic
assignment. Fortunately I was able to join a late-
night charter flight—in a tiny plane loaded with
dropped dogs.
We took off, and I remember smiling as I looked
out the window at the night sky opening up over a
pitch-black Alaska wilderness. Buckled up in that
plane, wearing the fancy parka I never ended up
returning, surrounded by 16 dogs in sacks, I too felt
safe and calm. 0
Photographer Katie Orlinsky, based in New York City, has
covered the Arctic for more than five years. Her latest feature,
“The Carbon Threat,” focused on permafrost thaw.
ASIA
1000
Eagle,
Alaska
NORTH
AMER ica
The estimated number of booties
each musher carries during the
Yukon Quest race to protect the feet
of the dogs on his or her team.
NGM MAPS
‘Bieney + PIXAR + MARV + WARE + [occ
Start Streaming March 2020
BY THE NUMBERS
60
ESTIMATED AGE OF as § , | 4 ¥
ROCK FORMATIONS IN | .
MILLIONS OF YEARS
“AUG
STEPS REQUIRED TO
REACH ROUSSANOU bined i
MONASTERY ge
HOURS FROM
ATHENS BY CAR
©" GREECE
BY DANIEL STONE PHOTOGRAPH BY VESELIN ATANASOV
30 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NGM MAPS
v
THE MONASTERIES of Meteora, Greece, are marvels of engineering.
SACRED HEIGHTS
i-lgel al=te R=} ke) OMT-laloicolal-KellaicMM al camanrolar-tidteke=)i cm allele l-lamlamex-\alecss
dalcelele]areleiumaal—\-mCli-\-] @@)adaleleley at-laadel-la(-a ci (ram dal-mecevale—iaa] el (1a N=)
solitude sought by the monks who built them between the 14th and 17th
centuries. The most intimate, Roussanou Monastery (left), is now home
icon Com all latcw-] aCe m are)(e(-Mc-)| (ace) msy-) [nhl st] y=] ¢-Fu Le) o1U](-] mia mant=Lell-\(4-] MalAaon
HOW TO GET THERE
For centuries'the only way
i MoM c-r-(el gm XoLUSs-]alelU i=] a\e|
the other Meteora mon-
asteries in central Greece
was by climbing retract-
Fe) [-mt-ke (ek-la-mol al eX-J [ale]
lifted up in a net basket.
Restricted access kept the
faithful in and the faithless
out. Today new tunnels
and steep roads and stair-
cases open the churches
iwom-VanZolaK-mall fare Maem ante) <=
EMelhicirel-mrelUlaal-yan luce (-re
tours are recommended
Kom of-1a R-VaU Tae (-1ac1m-] ple aay)
Vika am alice) al =n
WHAT YOU’LL SEE
Inside: Sixteenth-century
Byzantine frescoes fill
Roussanou’s chapel, from
the walls to the domed
ceiling, with illustrations
of planets, peacocks, and
seraphim. Ostrich eggs
are displayed as symbols
of kingship, resurrection,
ET aveMy-Ni-1,<-1-1 ale p
(olti <1 (o (-} Mote) olen zamyaareya
crossing the small bridge
into Roussanou to see
the monastery’s private
garden, says Greek travel
expert George Kourelis.
Look up to see eagles,
falcons, and rare vultures.
EXPLORE NEARBY
Around Roussanou are
16 ancient hermetic caves
((of-Yol roll ell fan) o)iavep eXetela:))
ave maNi-meoldat-landUlaveid royal lave)
Coll dakey oMeateyarelia-id(-1n Coli
the original 24). The Great
Meteoron Monastery
houses the skulls of monks
who lived there, along with
wl olesTalam ex-liavaiate eeclate maat=)
church's 14th-century bread
oven. Most of the churches
NVA-1k= me (Ta atcle [-1e ll ON AEN
rome} t-te] late m-late MuZ-lalamaal=
20th century, but they
have since been restored.
MARCH 2020 _ 31
TRAVEL | CHECKLIST
Here are five ways
tocelebrate flowers
and gardens around
MARCH
the world this spring.
BY MARYELLEN
KENNEDY DUCKETT
ART EXHIBITION
DIG INTO
DETAILED
DEPICTIONS
OF PLANTS AT
THE NATIONAL
GALLERY OF
IRELAND IN
DUBLIN. THE
EXHIBITION
“DRAWN FROM
NATURE: IRISH
BOTANICAL
ART’ RUNS
MARCH 7
TO JUNE 21.
LIGHT SCULPTURES
How Does Your
Garden Glow?
Find out at South
Carolina's Brook-
green Gardens
April 8 through
September 12,
when artist Bruce
Munro's installa-
tions illuminate
seven areas, includ-
ing the arboretum.
Munro also created
California's recent
“Field of Light at
Sensorio,” above. AIRPORT THE JEWEL COMPLEX at Singapore’s Changi Airport
takes “green travel” literally. Inside the terrarium-like
dome, find more than 2,000 trees and 100,000 shrubs,
plus the world’s tallest indoor waterfall.
In Nature’s Best Hope,
Lone Star State Flower author Douglas W.
Waves of wild bluebonnets turn NATURES Tallamy gives home-
the Texas Hill Country into a sea BEST 1s owners tips on how to
of cerulean and nourish several a . : establish conservation
species of butterflies, typically from Eiken corridors in their
late March until mid to late April. own backyards.
BLOSSOM WATCH
PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT): GEORGE LIN; COBRA LILY, DARLINGTONIA CALIFORNICA (DETAIL), 1886, BY LYDIA SHACKLETON,
COURTESY NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDENS, DUBLIN; EM CAMPOS; MARK THIESSEN, NGM STAFF; LEENA ROBINSON, ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
REEF REVIVAL
BY THERESA MACHEMER
BEAUTIFUL AND FRAGILE, Coral reefs in
tropical oceans worldwide are threat-
ened by climate change, storms, and
bleaching. Now travelers can help
restore them by supporting coral
replanting programs.
National Geographic Explorer Paola
Rodriguez-Troncoso has worked on
a Mexican program that sustainably
replanted more than 6,000 coral frag-
ments over six years. In this project,
divers collect fragments from the
ocean floor that have been knocked
off reefs by storms or waves. Then they
tether healthy pieces to the substrata
of reefs at the same or nearby sites. It’s
a process that can vary by location.
In Moorea, French
Polynesia, the nonprofit
fo] cole] om Gro) g-] Ml-Ice(-1al-16)
tends broken pieces of
(fol g-1 mela lr- ale las-10’aie-) ©) (=)
for one month before
reattaching them to
reefs. Travelers there can
adopt a coral piece and
help the group plant it.
DISCOVERY
For example, in some areas where
reefs border lagoons, such as French
Polynesia (below), the coral fragments
are placed in underwater nurseries to
recuperate before replanting.
Resorts and conservation groups are
starting to educate and involve visi-
tors in these efforts. To avoid programs
iW okcvam cot-byme (ob veloyaomet-bavemmet-vemxelolen
Rodriguez-Troncoso cautions against
any that purposely break off fragments
from healthy corals or fail to get the
required permits. Though replanted
fragments grow slowly, each one can be
part of a reef’s centuries-long life span.
“That small seed,” Rodriguez-Troncoso
says, “that will really help.”
PHOTO: CRISTINA MITTERMEIER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IMAGE COLLECTION
TRAVEL |
CLOSER LOOK
Af MA Sy
teh
ee
On the 142-mile Kokopelli’s Trail, a group of bikepackers race against dusk on Porcupine Rim, a fast and scenic descent into Moab, Utah.
BIKEPAGKING THE WEST
STRETCHING ALONG PUBLIC LANDS ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU,
KOKOPELLI’S TRAIL PIONEERED A NEW SPORT.
BY AARON GULLEY
THOUSANDS OF Visitors speed daily along Interstate
70 between the soaring cliffs of Colorado National
Monument and the fantastical sandstone of Utah’s
Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Compared
with those marquee destinations, the borderland
between them—an open range of cinnamon-colored
sand and scraggly juniper—seems barren and
anonymous. But out of sight, a backcountry mountain
bike path, Kokopelli’s Trail, takes in 142 miles of slot
canyons, bluffs, and desert mesas as formidable and
astonishing as anything in the parks.
“It’s big, wild country,” says Chris Muhr, vice
president of the Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike
Trail Association, the group that has stewarded the
Kokopelli since its 1989 completion. “When the guys
first talked about biking out there, it seemed crazy.
But it’s land that’s hard to resist.”
It’s also land that’s highly valuable. Every mile of
the trail is on public property, a patchwork of Bureau
of Land Management-administered rangelands,
national forests, and the McInnis Canyons National
Conservation Area. Linking so much public land is
no small feat in Utah, a state with a vocal political
movement for land transfers and privatization. In
recent years the state’s land conflicts bubbled onto
the national stage with the fight over Bears Ears and
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Grand Staircase—Escalante National Monuments,
both southwest of the Kokopelli. Those disputes,
which pit preservation against development and
extraction, are a microcosm of a larger struggle.
According to a 2019 study in the journal Science,
protected lands are increasingly in jeopardy world-
wide, with 90 percent of reductions to public lands
in the United States made since 2000.
“Vast expanses of undeveloped tracts of public
lands like the Kokopelli are less and less common
in the West,” says Kurt Refsnider, executive director
of the cycling advocacy group Bikepacking Roots.
(Refsnider also holds the fastest known time for
biking the Kokopelli: 11 hours and 52 minutes.) “The
first step in preserving such lands is getting people
out using them and engaged.”
So when you get to ride across more than a hun-
dred miles of unblemished land these days, it’s not
only a rare experience; it’s also a ballot cast for land
conservation. I got to do just that when I pedaled the
Kokopelli in early November with my brother-in-law,
Trevor Webb.
We rolled out of the Colorado border town of
Fruita on a bracing Friday morning, alone on the
rock benches above the Colorado River. Strictly
speaking, the Kokopelli isn’t just one trail but a
stitched-together tapestry of single-track, back-
country roads and even a bit of pavement that very
roughly follows the river between Loma, Colorado,
and Moab, Utah. After crossing Salt Creek a couple
of hours into our ride, we cruised through a sea of
grasslands turned flaxen with the gathering autumn
and passed outcrops that were like battleships of
sandstone. Once we'd turned south, we rode through
great basins where towers of rock balanced like out-
size skeleton keys sunk in the sand. Over our entire
three-day trip, we'd see only three 4x4s and a half
dozen cyclists. Considering the throngs that visit the
nearby parks and monuments (in 2018, more than a
third of a million people entered Colorado National
Monument while 2.4 million went to Arches and
Canyonlands combined), the trail’s solitude makes
its vistas feel all the more exclusive.
The Kokopelli has always been about big ideas.
When the concept of the trail was hatched in the
late 80s, mountain biking was little more than a few
eccentric cyclists modifying street bikes for off-road
use. “It was taking off in Crested Butte and in Moab,
and I just thought that if we could figure out a trail
to link those two places through Grand Junction,
maybe we'd have something positive instead of just
oil shale,” says Timms Fowler, whom Muhr describes
as the visionary for the trail.
Though the project never grew beyond the initial
Loma-to-Moab segment, it laid the groundwork for
subsequent trails and systems that have turned the
region into a riding hotbed, one of the first places to
capitalize on the sport. Today the Kokopelli seems
tailor-made for one of the industry’s growing trends:
bikepacking, in which cyclists ride with all their gear
on multiday adventures. “I don’t think they’d have
anything to bikepack these days if we hadn’t started
putting in trails like the Kokopelli,” says Muhr. “It
was the first of its kind.” O
Aaron Gulley is a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based journalist who
has written for two decades on cycling, travel, sports, and fitness.
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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MARCH 2020
The End of Trash........ P. 42
The Secrets of Bees ....P. 72
Kidnapped Students.. P. 84
Japanese Macaques.. P. 98
Trailblazing Women.. P. 114
FEATURES
THEY ARE
NOT REGULAR
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PHOTO: BENEDICTE KURZEN
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A world without waste
sounds impossible.
But the vision of
a circular economy—
where we use resources
sparingly and recycle
materials endlessly—is
inspiring businesses and
environmentalists alike.
Can we make it happen?
Can we afford not to?
BY ROBERT KUNZIG
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUCA LOCATELLI
N AMSTERDAM | met a man
who revealed to me the hid-
den currents of our lives—the
massive flows of raw materi-
als and products deployed,
to such wonderful and dam-
aging effect, by 7.7 billion
humans. Our shared metab-
olism, you might say. It was a
crisp fall morning, and I was
sitting in a magnificent old
brick pile on the Oosterpark,
a palace of curved corridors
and grand staircases and
useless turrets. A century
ago, when the Dutch were
still extracting coffee, oil, and
rubber from their colony in
Indonesia, this building had
been erected as a colonial
research institute. Now it houses assorted
do-gooder organizations. The one Marc de
Wit works for is called Circle Economy, and
it’s part of a buzzing international movement
that aims to reform how we've done just about
everything for the past two centuries—since
the rise of the steam engine, “if you need to
pinpoint a time,” de Wit said.
De Wit is 39, genial, bespectacled, a lit-
tle disheveled, a chemist by training. He
opened a pamphlet and spread out a diagram
he called “an x-ray of our global economy.”
Unlike natural ecosystems, which operate
in cycles—plants grow in soil, animals eat
48 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
i
L
Global resources, 2015
in billions of tons Take
From the Earth
The vast majority of
inputs to the econ-
omy, 93 billion tons
in 2015, are resources
extracted from the
Earth: both finite Minerals
(minerals, ores, and 41.8 MINING
fossil fuels) and
renewable ones
(biomass).
Extracted
resources
93
MINING
Total Ores
resources 10.6
entering
the global
economy
102.3
Fossil
fuels EXTRACTION
18.3
FORESTRY
FARMING
Biomass
31.6
Reused
resources
9.3 |
Every year we transform more than 100 billion tons of raw material into products.
Less than a quarter becomes buildings, cars, or other long-lasting things. Less
than 10 percent cycles back into the economy. The circular economy movement
aims to increase that number and reduce the enormous amount of waste.
Produce Provide Societal needs End of use
Process
>
To the dump
Two-thirds of the
material flowing
through the economy,
674 billion tons in
2015, gets emitted as
pollution—the carbon
from fossil fuels, for
-example—or other-
wise scattered or
disposed of as waste.
Dispersed into
the environment
as unrecoverable
waste
67.4
Uf)
Yeguaaca
Year rc ;
Gerson
Giisons esting
7material
7
A
Incineration O.
Composting 0.1
Biogasification 1.9
Water treatment 4
NGM STAFF. SOURCE: CIRCLE ECONOMY
plants, dung replenishes soil—the industrial
economy is largely linear. On the diagram, fat,
colored currents of the four types of raw mate-
rial—minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and biomass—
surged from left to right, splitting and braiding
as they became products that met seven human
needs. Sand went into concrete apartment towers
on six continents. Metal ore became ships, cars,
and also combine harvesters—in a single year
we harvested 22.2 billion tons of biomass, just to
feed us all. Fossil fuels powered those vehicles,
kept us warm, became plastic, became all kinds
of things. The total flow into the economy in 2015
was 102.3 billion tons.
All good so far; amazing even, if you’re the
type to be amazed by human effort and inge-
nuity. It’s what happens next, after our needs
are met, that’s the problem—the mother of all
environmental problems, in fact. De Wit pointed
to the gray fog on the right edge of the diagram.
The gray fog is waste.
In 2015, he explained, about two-thirds of the
material we scratched from the planet slipped
through our fingers. More than 67 billion tons
of hard-won stuff was lost, most of it scattered
irretrievably. Plastic trash drifted into rivers and
oceans; so did nitrates and phosphates leaching
from fertilized fields. A third of all food rotted,
even as the Amazon was deforested to produce
more. Think of an environmental problem,
and chances are it’s connected to waste. That
includes climate change: It happens because we
burn fossil fuels and scatter the waste—carbon
dioxide—into the atmosphere.
This may sound ridiculous, but as de Wit
walked me through the numbers that morning,
it felt like an epiphany. There was a unifying,
exhilarating clarity to that wonky diagram, to the
way it defined the task. Sure, it said, the threats
we face are multifarious and overwhelming.
Sure, they’re planetary in scale. But really, to get
along on this Earth, we must do just one thing:
Stop wasting so much of it. De Wit pointed to a
thin arrow that circled back, from right to left,
along the bottom of the diagram, represent-
ing all the material we’d managed to capture
through recycling, composting, and so on. It was
only 9.3 billion tons: just 9 percent of the total.
The “circularity gap,” as de Wit and his col-
leagues dubbed it when they presented their
report at the World Economic Forum in Davos
in 2018, is relatively new in human history. It
dates to our industrial use of fossil fuels in the
50 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
18th century. Until then, most of what humans
did was done with muscle power, whether
human or animal. Growing things, making
things, shipping things took hard labor, which
made them valuable. Our limited physical energy
also restricted how big a dent we could put in
the planet. It kept most of us very poor, however.
Cheap fossil energy, concentrated by geologic
time and pressure in seams of coal or pools of
oil, changed all that. It made it easier to extract
raw materials anywhere, ship them to factories,
and send the merchandise everywhere. Fossil
fuels exploded our possibilities—and the pro-
cess keeps intensifying. In the past half century,
while the world’s population has more than dou-
bled, the amount of material flowing through the
economy has more than tripled.
“Now we're reaching the limits,” de Wit said.
For that same half century, environmental-
ists have been warning of limits to growth. The
new “circular economy” movement is different.
It’s acollection of strategies—some old, such as
reducing, reusing, and recycling, and some new,
such as renting rather than owning things—that
together are meant to reshape the global econ-
omy to eliminate waste. The circular economy
doesn’t aim to end growth; it aims to bend how
we do things back into harmony with nature, so
that growth can continue. “Prosperity in a world
of finite resources,” as European environment
commissioner Janez Potoénik once put it, in
the foreword to an Ellen MacArthur Foundation
report. It said the circular economy could save
European businesses up to $630 billion a year.
The idea is catching on, particularly in Europe,
that small, crowded, rich but resource-poor con-
tinent. The European Union is investing billions
in the strategy. The Netherlands has pledged to
go fully circular by 2050. Amsterdam, Paris, and
London all have plans. “It must happen,” said
Wayne Hubbard, head of the London Waste and
Recycling Board, when I asked whether the cir-
cular economy could happen.
One man who definitely thinks it could hap-
pen, and whose work has proved revelatory to
many others, is American architect William
McDonough. With German chemist Michael
Braungart, he wrote the visionary 2002 book
Cradle to Cradle, which argues that products and
economic processes could be designed such that
all waste becomes fodder for something else.
Before setting off for Europe, I made a pilgrim-
age to McDonough’s office in Charlottesville,
Virginia. Our conversation ricocheted from his
childhood in Tokyo, through Plato, Aristotle, and
Buckminster Fuller, to some new compostable
blue jeans he was excited about, before I finally
managed to ask him the nagging question: Is all
this talk of an end to waste just pie in the sky?
“It’s absolutely pie in the sky, no question
about it,” McDonough said. “You need pies in
the sky to help us go forward. Because remember
what Leibniz said.”
I didn’t remember much about that German
philosopher.
“Leibniz said, ‘If it is possible, therefore it
exists.’ And I’m saying, ‘If we can make it exist,
it’s therefore possible.’ ”
Was that tautological? Was it wise? Did Leibniz
really say that? It was intriguing, in any case. Not
long after that, I took my busted old roller bag to
be repaired (very circular, compared with buy-
ing a new one), packed the certified cradle-to-
cradle jeans that McDonough had given me, and
headed out to see what evidence of possible exis-
tence I could find for the circular economy.
Metals
THE FIRST SMALL BREAKS in our natural circular-
ity actually predate the 18th-century industrial
revolution. The Romans, besides tossing bro-
ken amphorae around in an uninhibited way,
pioneered a fraught invention: sewers. That is,
they channeled human waste into rivers, instead
of returning it to fields where, as any circular-
ity maven will tell you, those nutrients belong.
As a young boy in Tokyo in the 1950s (his par-
ents were in the occupying American Army),
McDonough recalls waking at night to the sound
of farmers collecting the family’s night soil. His
mother would soothe him with lullabies about
poop, sometimes in Japanese with an Alabama
accent. It made a permanent impression.
The Romans, like the Phoenicians before
them, also mined copper from the rich deposits
at Rio Tinto in Spain. But they recycled too: They
melted down bronze statues from conquered
peoples to make weapons. Copper has always
been a prime target for recyclers. Compared with
sewage, it’s scarce and valuable.
In the yard at the Aurubis copper smelter in
Linen, in the Ruhr region of western Germany,
a large bust of Lenin stands in a flower bed—a
souvenir of the many bronze Lenins melted here,
from towns around communist East Germany,
after East and West were reunited in 1990. Auru-
bis, Europe’s largest copper producer, is also the
world’s largest copper recycler. When the Ltinen
plant was built in 1916, at the height of World
War I, copper for artillery shells was in short sup-
ply, and Germans were pulling bronze bells out
of church towers. “Since that day, this plant has
exclusively done recycling,” said Detlev Laser,
the deputy plant manager.
Copper, unlike plastic, say, can be recycled
indefinitely without loss of quality—it’s a perfect
circular material. The Liinen plant still processes
bulk copper, mostly pipes and cables, but it has
had to adapt to waste with much lower concen-
trations. As Europe has replaced landfills with
municipal incinerators, a lot of slag is showing
up containing bits of metal—“because someone
threw their cell phone in the trash” instead of the
recycling bin, Laser said.
With Hendrik Roth, the plant’s environmental
manager, I watched an excavator drop bucket-
loads of electronic debris, including laptops,
onto a sloping conveyor that carried it toward a
shredder—the first of more than a dozen steps in
the bewildering and deafening sorting process.
At one station, a conveyor raced by, carrying
hand-size shards of circuit boards. Some fell into
an abyss; others leaped as if by their own voli-
tion onto a belt above. A camera system, Roth
explained, was deciding whether each shard
contained metal—and if not, activating an air
jet under it at just the right instant.
Aurubis sells the aluminum and plastic it
recovers to those industries; copper and other
nonferrous metals go into its own ovens. In the
tidy yard, the dust is swept daily and fed to the
smelter. “We have no waste here,” Laser said.
Worldwide, only about a fifth of all electronic
waste is recycled, according to a 2017 UN report.
Aurubis even takes shipments from the United
States. “But I do wonder sometimes why such
a highly industrialized country would give up
such resources,” Roth said. “They’re sitting on
billions.” That’s starting to change. Apple, for
example, encourages customers to trade in old
iPhones; an intelligent robot in Texas dismantles
them and extracts materials for new devices.
But copper exemplifies a general challenge:
There’s a limit to what even aggressive recycling
can accomplish. At Aurubis, recycled copper
accounts for only a third of production; the rest
THE END OF TRASH _ 51
Reusing machinery
is a time-honored
strategy for reducing
waste. Nearly 3,300
decommissioned U.S.
government planes and
helicopters are stored
at Davis-Monthan Air
Force Base (right) in
Tucson, Arizona, where
dry air limits corrosion.
The aircraft are scav-
enged for parts (next
ohoto) or restored and
returned to service.
To preserve them,
they are sprayed with
a removable protective
coating. The facility,
often called the Bone-
yard, is the largest
of its kind.
Switching from fossil
fuels to renewable
energy, like the heat
generated by magma
beneath Iceland's lava
fields, is an essential
step In creating a circu-
lar economy. The Hell-
isheidi Power Station
(right), the country’s
largest geothermal
plant and the world’s
third largest, produces
electricity as well
as heat for homes.
Geodesic domes over
each well help reduce
the visual blot on the
landscape. At the Blue
Lagoon (next photo),
geothermal water that
has already generated
electricity at the Svart-
sengi Power Station
and is no longer scald-
ing is used to create a
popular tourist attrac-
tion. The water's high
silica content keeps it
from leaching into the
lava field and gives it
an appealing aqua tint.
LA
ee ens hea
. eats a ”
still comes from mines. World copper produc-
tion has quadrupled in the past half century and
is still growing. The technologies we need to get
off fossil fuels require a lot of copper; a single
giant wind turbine uses about 33 tons.
“Demand is growing,” Laser said. “You'll never
cover that with recycling.” The circular economy
is going to require other strategies.
Clothes
THE EMBLEM OF the Ellen MacArthur Foun-
dation, a set of nested circles, was on Dame
Ellen’s teal hoodie when we met in her head-
quarters, an old sailmaker’s loft on the Isle of
Wight. In 2005, at age 28, MacArthur finished
sailing around the world on a 75-foot trimaran
in a record time of just over 71 days—alone.
She had packed 72 days’ worth of food. She had
raced storms off Antarctica and fixed a broken
generator. She arrived home, having survived a
microcosm of Spaceship Earth, with a visceral
awareness of limited resources.
Why wasn’t everyone talking about that? she
wondered. She gave up competitive sailing and
instead traded on her fame and access to cor-
porate boardrooms—‘“it would be a waste not to
use it,” she told me—to establish an organization
that has done more than any other to promote
the circular economy, using a hierarchy of strat-
egies (see diagram on page 69). The best is the
simplest: Waste less stuff by keeping it in use.
That choice hits many people most acutely in
their closets. From 2000 to 2015, while the world
population grew by a fifth, clothing production
doubled, according to an Ellen MacArthur Foun-
dation report, thanks to the explosion of “fast
fashion.” With so many cheap clothes, the report
estimated, the average item was worn a third
fewer times by 2015. That year, the world threw
away more than $450 billion worth of clothes.
Jorik Boer makes a living rescuing some of
them as head of the Boer Group, a Dutch family
business that began a century ago on the streets
of Rotterdam with his great-grandfather collect-
ing rags, metal, and paper in a cart. Today, from
his base in Dordrecht, Boer runs five plants in
the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany.
Together they collect and sort—and resell for
reuse or recycling—up to 460 tons of discarded
clothing a day.
60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
People have the wrong idea about what hap-
pens when they drop clothes into a donation
bin, Boer said; they think the clothes are given
directly to needy people. What usually happens
instead is that companies like Boer buy donated
clothing, sort it, and resell it—all over the world.
“You need a lot of experience to know where
you can sell and reuse a piece of clothing,”
Boer said. Through the window behind him, I
could see the rapid but practiced movements
of women pulling clothes from conveyors,
examining each item briefly, then pivoting and
tossing it into one of 60 or so bags. Each woman
sorts about three tons a day, Boer said. Sorters
must have an eye for fashion—especially for
the best stuff, just 5 or 10 percent of the total,
which makes most of Boer’s profit. In Russia and
eastern Europe, prized items such as women’s
underwear can fetch up to five euros a kilogram
($2.50 a pound). Most lower quality material gets
shipped in 55-kilogram bales to Africa, where it’s
sold for as little as 50 cents a kilo.
At one point Boer eyeballed my gray sport
coat, which I felt quite confident of; he couldn’t
see the ink stains on the inside pocket. “We can-
not sell your jacket anywhere,” he volunteered
cheerfully. “No one in the world wants to buy it.”
Boer said he would actually have to pay someone
to take my unfashionable garment away.
But they buy used underwear? I was miffed.
“That’s clean, used underwear,” Boer said.
People normally don’t donate dirty clothes.
He gets more clothing these days than he can
handle, mostly from Germany, which collects
75 percent of its discards: Town governments
have gotten into the act. He can’t find enough
skilled workers. At the T-shirt grading station,
I noticed an older man. “That’s my dad,” Boer
explained. Marinus, the retired CEO, still pitches
in. He loves the work.
The Boers’ biggest worry is how clothing is
changing. Right now the company is able to
resell 60 percent of what it collects. Clothes that
are kept in service and worn again are better for
the planet—the material and energy that went
into making them don’t have to be replaced—
and also for Boer. “It’s what’s financing this
whole business,” he said.
The other 40 percent, the clothes no one
wants, are recycled as wipe cloths or shredded
for insulation or mattress stuffing. Some are
incinerated. The recycled fraction increasingly
includes cheaply made, worn-out items. Boer
loses money on almost all of it. Fast fashion, he
said, could help put him out of business.
There’s one form of recycling he makes a mod-
est profit on. For decades Boer has shipped wool
sweaters and other loose knits to companies in
Prato, Italy, that mechanically tease the wool
apart, recapturing long fibers that can become
good-as-new garments. Woven cotton or polyes-
ter can’t be recycled that way; the fibers end up
too short. Half a dozen start-ups are working on
technology to chemically recycle these fibers. To
spur its development, Boer thinks the European
Union should require new clothes to contain,
say, 20 percent recycled fibers.
“In 10 years it will be there,” Boer said. “It has
to be there.”
At Ellen MacArthur I heard enthusiasm for a
different business model, one that might pro-
mote circularity in many economic sectors—a
model based on renting rather than owning.
Rent the Runway and other online clothes-rental
companies make up less than a 10th of a percent
of the global fashion market so far, but they’re
growing fast.
In theory, renting is more sustainable: If many
people share the same item, fewer clothes might
be needed overall. In practice, that’s not cer-
tain; customers might just add luxury rentals
to existing wardrobes. Renting will certainly add
to the packaging, shipping, and dry-cleaning of
clothes. Writing in Elle recently, journalist Eliza-
beth Cline, author of two books on fast fashion,
tried to sort out the pros and cons. “Wearing
what’s already in your closet is the most sustain-
able way to get dressed,” she concluded.
Food
PEOPLE CAN'T GO CIRCULAR On their own; the sys-
tem has to change. But individual choices do mat-
ter. “It’s about using less stuff in the first place,”
said Liz Goodwin of the World Resources Institute.
In 2008 the Waste and Resources Action Pro-
gramme (WRAP), which Goodwin ran then,
did one of the first major studies of food waste.
The nonprofit surveyed more than 2,100 British
families who had agreed to let inspectors paw
through their garbage and weigh each food
scrap. “Absolutely shocking,” Goodwin recalled.
“We found whole chickens in their wrappers.”
Nearly half of all salad and a quarter of all fruit
AN END TO PLASTIC TRASH
Plastic isn’t the enemy, but plastic waste in
the ocean and elsewhere is a global plague.
Are biodegradables and recycling the cure?
Staff writer Laura Parker considers what a
circular economy for plastics might look like.
For that article and other plastics coverage,
go to natgeo.com/plastic.
was ending up in bins, as were nearly 400,000
tons of potatoes a year. In all, Britons were toss-
ing one of every three bags of groceries.
As it turned out, they’re not exceptional.
Roughly a third of all food is wasted globally,
at an annual cost of nearly a trillion dollars,
WRAP’s global director, Richard Swannell, told
me. Over dinner at a restaurant in Oxford, at
which we both took care to clean our plates,
Swannell explained that before the WRAP study,
no one was aware of just how much food—and
money—was going to waste in Britain.
WRAP launched a chipper PR campaign
(“Love Food Hate Waste”). It worked with wom-
en’s groups to disseminate food-rescue tips. (A
favorite was ways to dress up toast to save stale
bread.) It also persuaded grocery chains to adopt
some simple measures: Clearer, extended “use
by” dates; smaller, resealable packages; an end
to “buy one, get one free” sales on perishables.
It was boring stuff, forgotten common sense, but
it worked. By 2012 the amount of edible food
wasted in Britain had fallen by a fifth. “We’ve
had massive progress,” Swannell said.
The progress has stalled lately, but no one ever
thought common sense alone would end food
waste. Artificial intelligence may be required.
From a remodeled Victorian furniture factory in
the Shoreditch section of London, Marc Zornes,
CEO of Winnow, is pitching a high-tech solution
that his start-up already has placed into 1,300
restaurant kitchens: smart garbage cans.
Zornes demonstrated one in his conference
room, using a plastic chicken leg. Each time a
cook or waiter dumps a pot or platter of some-
thing into a Winnow can, a scale measures the
added weight and a camera snaps a picture. The
AI software identifies the new garbage—at Ikea
it has learned to distinguish three kinds of meat-
balls—and displays its cost.
Zornes claimed his clients—AccorHotels, the
French multinational, is another big one—rou-
tinely cut food waste in half by listening to their
THE END OF TRASH _ 61
The world's largest
indoor vertical farm,
operated by Aerofarms
at its headquarters in
Newark, New Jersey,
aims to raise vegetables
sustainably year-round
in the heart of cities.
Baby leafy greens are
grown ona reusable
substrate made from
recycled plastic bottles.
Water is misted on the
roots from below, sav-
ing 95 percent of what
would be needed out-
doors. No pesticides
are used. Nutrients and
fertilizers are applied
only as needed. And the
lighting provides the
specific wavelength that
the vegetables require.
The company says its
yields are 390 times as
high as farming in fields.
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In Prato, Italy, where wool cloth has been produ
Black soldier flies raised on food waste might replace soy as a protein in ani-
mal feed, saving land. Entocycle, a British start-up, tests breeding conditions 3,500 companies employing 40,000 workers pre
at its London lab (above) and feeds brewery and coffee waste to the larvae. the wool is sorted by color, washed, and shred
They're harvested (below) after just two weeks. Only one percent of textile waste is currently re
ced since the 12th century, some
cess discarded textiles (above). After
ed (below), it’s soun back into yarn.
cycled into new clothing.
BY-PRODUCTS
In Kalundborg, Denmark, 11 companies cooperate to convert waste into resources.
Novo Nordisk, which makes insulin, uses steam from a nearby power plant to sterilize
equipment (above). It sends massive amounts of yeast slurry to a bioenergy plant,
where a technician tests a spoonful (below), and microbes process it into natural gas.
garbage cans. Breakfast buffets are notorious, he
said; most leftovers are discarded. “When you
start measuring the problem, you start manag-
ing it,” Zornes said. You make less of what you're
throwing out. I had walked through Winnow’s
eraffiti-decorated carriage doors expecting
grooviness and hype; I walked out wanting to tell
my nephew, a Ritz-Carlton chef, about Winnow.
A few days later I had a similar experience in
Amsterdam at InStock, a restaurant that makes
ambitious cuisine from surplus food. In a spare
but cozily lit room, I sat down under a wooden
sign that tallied the “rescued food”—780,054
kilograms, or more than 850 tons. One of the
founders, Freke van Nimwegen, was at the bar
checking the books. She joined me and told me
her story as my prix fixe menu ran its courses.
Van Nimwegen was two years out of business
school and working for Albert Heijn, the largest
Dutch grocery chain, when she discovered the
food waste problem. As an assistant store man-
ager she wanted to do something about it, and
she couldn’t—food banks might take some bread
but not all the produce. She and two co-workers
came up with the idea for InStock in 2014 and
persuaded the company to support it. It has gone
from a pop-up to this restaurant to two others in
Utrecht and The Hague, and for van Nimwegen,
it was just getting really interesting.
“It’s not that we had a dream to start a restau-
rant chain,” she said. “Not at all. We wanted to
do something about food waste.”
My main course arrived: nuggets of “Kentucky
Fried Goose.” “Watch out, there can be bullets
in the meat,” said the waitress. Schiphol Airport,
van Nimwegen explained, employs hunters to
dispatch wild geese that might otherwise foul jet
engines. The dead birds used to be incinerated;
now they come here. The nuggets were chewy
but tasty and bullet free. With eggplant chutney
and red pepper coulis they went down nicely.
The chefs at InStock improvise with whatever
they get. The food comes from Albert Heijn
but also from producers, including farmers.
“It’s easy to point fingers at the supermarket,”
van Nimwegen said. “The whole supply chain,
including the customer—everybody wants
everything in stock. We're just spoiled, basically.
The companies don’t want to sell ‘no.’ So they’ll
always have a little bit too much.”
In 2018 InStock started delivering surplus
food to other restaurants. Van Nimwegen’s pri-
ority now is to get contracts to supply corporate
68 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
cafeterias. “The most important thing for us is to
make volume,” she said. “These kinds of places
have a thousand people that need lunch.” The
Dutch have managed to decrease food waste by
29 percent since 2010, according to a govern-
ment report, even more than the British.
Dessert was a fabulous foam of berries and
cherries poached in red wine, from bottles
open too long at the bar. The bill came in a toy
shopping cart filled with misshapen fruit: a flat
peach and a very skinny pear. I pocketed them
to supplement the lunches I’d be rescuing from
the breakfast buffet and, feeling a pleasant com-
bination of woke and well-fed, cycled back to
my hotel through the misty Amsterdam night.
In my room I found a bat flying in frantic cir-
cles. Watching the poor beast search for the open
window, I sensed another gift, a metaphor this
time. But at first I didn’t know what to do with it.
Openings
GETTING OUT OF THE TRAP We ve entered with
the linear economy, and back to an economy
modeled on nature’s, is going to take a lot of
“divergent thinking,” as psychologists call it. In
Copenhagen I paused to admire the new munic-
ipal incinerator, which burns trash for energy
and definitely diverges from the norm: There’s
an all-season ski slope on its roof. But my real
destination was the nearby port of Kalundborg,
something of a circular economy icon.
There I sat in a cramped conference room with
the managers of 11 industrial plants, separate
companies all, who have formed an unusual
bond: They use each other’s waste. The chair-
man of the group, Michael Hallgren, manages a
Novo Nordisk plant that makes half the world’s
supply of insulin—and along with its sister com-
pany, Novozymes, 330,000 tons of spent yeast.
That slurry is trucked to a bioenergy plant, where
microbes convert it to enough biogas for 6,000
homes and enough fertilizer for nearly 50,000
acres. That’s just the latest of 22 exchanges of
waste—water, energy, or materials—that make
up the Kalundborg Symbiosis.
It wasn’t planned, said Lisbeth Randers, the
town’s symbiosis coordinator; it grew up over four
decades, one bilateral deal at a time. A wallboard
company came to Kalundborg in part because
waste gas from the oil refinery was available as a
CLOSING
THE
CIRCLE
Use less
Renewable energy
replaces fossil fuels; rental
or sharing businesses
serve more people with
Use less, keep things in use longer, recycle endlessly—
a circular economy will take a range of strategies. In the
cradle-to-cradle vision, all products are ultimately broken
down either to “technical nutrients,” which are made into
new products, or biological ones, which return to the soil.
Waste is a design flaw. As in nature, it doesn’t exist.
No waste
All nutrients flow in
cycles. Almost noth-
ing is released asa
pollutant or dumped
Design wisely
Machines and other products
are designed to be long-
lasting and easy to repair—or
ephemeral and easy to break
fewer products. down into basic components. in a landfill.
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SOURCE: ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION
WHAT YOU
CAN DO
Recycle everything
Compost food waste
(or feed it to your pig).
Recycle everything
you can—and lobby for
more recycling.
Repair and reuse
Buy fewer, higher
quality products and
repair them when they
break. Donate the
clothes you don’t wear.
Restrain yourself
Fly and drive less.
Eat all the food you buy.
Wear the clothes you
already have. Avoid
single-use plastics.
cheap energy source; it later sourced gypsum from
the nearby coal-fired power plant, which made it
by scrubbing sulfur dioxide out of its smoke. None
of this happened primarily for environmental rea-
sons—but the Kalundborg Symbiosis, Randers
said, reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 635,000
metric tons a year, while saving the participants
$27 million. Hallgren is now overseeing the con-
struction of an insulin plant in Clayton, North
Carolina. “I have a dream that Ican make a sym-
biosis work in Clayton,” he said.
In the rolling fields of Westphalia in Germany,
home to a famous kind of ham and, not inci-
dentally, many pigs, I met a woman who, with
no engineering education, has designed an
industrial-scale solution to one of the region’s
major problems: too much pig manure. Nitrates
leaching from overfertilized fields have polluted
groundwater in about a quarter of Germany. A
typical farmer around the town of Velen, where I
met Doris Nienhaus, might spend $40,000 a year
to truck nearly 2,000 tons of liquid manure more
than a hundred miles away to a field that’s not
already manured up. “At some point it won't be
economically viable,” Nienhaus said.
Her solution is a plant that extracts the basic
nutrients—phosphorus, nitrogen, and potas-
sium—from manure. Nienhaus, who used to
work for the regional agricultural federation and
has raised pigs, persuaded 90 farmers to invest
$8.4 million. Their farms’ manure is digested
by microbes, and the resulting biogas fuels a
generator that powers the plant, with electric-
ity left over to sell to the grid. Fast centrifuges,
a proprietary polymer, and hot ovens separate
the digester glop into a brown liquid, rich in
nitrogen and potassium, and a brown ash that
is 35 percent phosphorus. All that will be sold;
the plant will produce no waste, Nienhaus said.
When I visited, it was in its test phase. Nienhaus
displayed her first batch of potassium in a small
white dish, like granules from a gold strike.
Once upon a time, every farmer ran a circular
economy, keeping only as much livestock as his
or her land could feed, and those animals pooped
no more than the land could take. Industrial live-
stock operations broke that circle. A few years ago,
I spent some time on a cattle feedlot in Texas;
that’s when I started thinking about the circular
economy. I watched 110-car trains full of lowa
corn rumble into Hereford, Texas, and I saw hills
of manure at the feedlot, waiting to be sent to local
farms. Shouldn’t that be going back to Iowa to
70 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
fertilize the corn, I asked? Too expensive, was the
answer—but if a plant like Nienhaus’s were there,
only the nutrients would need to be shipped.
Maybe the circle could be unbroken again.
When Eben Bayer invented his new thing in
2006, he was an engineering student at Rensse-
laer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He
was taking a class in invention, learning to think
divergently, and the problem he was ponder-
ing—he’d read Cradle to Cradle—was the toxic
glues in particleboard or fiberglass. Growing up
on a Vermont farm, Bayer had spent hours shov-
eling wood chips into a furnace to make maple
syrup. The wood chips often stuck together—
because they’d been colonized by mycelium, the
dense mesh of microscopic fibers that make up
the roots of mushrooms. Bayer wondered: Could
mushrooms grow a harmless glue?
The first product he and his partner Gavin
McIntyre made at Ecovative Design, the com-
pany they founded, was packaging. They inoc-
ulated ground hemp fibers or wood chips with
small amounts of mycelium, and the tiny white
roots filled the spaces between the particles,
enmeshing and gluing them. They found the
stuff could be grown in molds of any shape. It
stops growing when you dehydrate it—and when
you're done with it, you can compost it. In the
past decade, Ecovative has made more than a
million pounds of packaging—packing corners,
display molds for cosmetics—for customers will-
ing to pay a little extra to be sustainable.
Lately they’ve moved on to bigger things—
things that are 100 percent mushroom. In soil
mycelium grows in layers of mesh, but when it
hits the air, it starts forming mushrooms. Ecova-
tive has figured out how to trick mycelium into
a hybrid growth pattern, in which it lays down
solid microlayers one after another. “It’s like a
biological 3-D printer,” Bayer said. With invest-
ment funding and $9.2 million from DARPA, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
Ecovative is expanding a lab to figure out how
to grow all manner of things—shoe soles, vegan
leather, edible scaffolding for artificial steaks—
from mycelium. In 2018 designer Stella McCart-
ney made a handbag out of the stuff and showed
it at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the cradle-to-cradle vision of McDonough
and Braungart, waste doesn’t exist even as
a concept. Every material is either a well-
designed “technical nutrient,” capable of being
endlessly recycled, or a biological one, safe to
eat or compost. Bayer shares that view—but
he’s betting most things will be biological in the
future. “Biologically derived materials already
fit into how Earth works,” he said. “Spaceship
Earth can digest this stuff.”
Beyond good and evil
ALL THE TRASH WE MAKE is not a sign that we're
evil. It’s a sign we're a little dumb. When I met
Michael Braungart in Hamburg, Germany, he
could barely wait for me to open my notebook
before making this most essential point. He
started his career as a Greenpeace activist, orches-
trating protests at chemical companies, and has
since consulted for many corporations. “We’re
fighting with cradle-to-cradle against a cultural
heritage that comes out of religious beliefs,” he
said, meaning monotheistic ones. The legacy
they’ve bequeathed to environmentalism, said
Braungart, is the idea that nature is good and
humans, in our effect on it, basically evil—the
best we can do is limit the damage. To Braungart
that’s misguided and unambitious. He’s an envi-
ronmentalist who, like chemists and engineers,
believes we can improve on nature. He once
designed a biodegradable ice-cream wrapper
implanted with wildflower seeds; you could litter
it, and it would propagate beauty.
Outside Amsterdam I visited a 23-acre office
park that McDonough’s firm designed and Braun-
gart helped select materials for, called Park 20/20.
When the developer, Coert Zachariasse, made his
own pilgrimage to Charlottesville a decade ago,
he was hoping the guru would reveal exactly
how to build a cradle-to-cradle office park. But
McDonough demurred. “He said, ‘We don’t know
yet, but we’re going to figure it out,” Zachariasse
recalled. The developer felt disappointed at first—
then liberated, empowered.
Park 20/20 is about three-quarters built, and
it’s already a green and pleasant office park. The
facades are varied and imaginative, the spaces
sunlit and inviting, the energy all renewable, the
wastewater treated and recycled on-site. One of
its coolest features is less apparent: Instead of
the usual concrete-slab floors, the buildings have
thinner, hollow, steel-beamed ones. They allow
seven stories to fit in the usual height of six, using
30 percent less material overall.
In winter, warm water from the neighboring
canal, stored underground since the previous
summer, flows through pipes in each subfloor,
heating the space above; in summer, cool canal
water from the previous winter flows through
pipes in each ceiling, cooling the space below.
And unlike concrete slabs, the prefabricated
floor-ceiling sections are designed to be disas-
sembled and reused, should the building need
to be reconfigured or demolished. The Park 20/20
buildings are “material banks”—whereas else-
where, building materials make up the largest
waste stream flowing into landfills.
In McDonough’s office I sat on an old Herman
Miller chair upholstered with the first product he
and Braungart ever designed, a fabric made of
wool and ramie, which is made from nettles. Both
men insisted it was edible, and had I been a goat, I
might have tested that assertion. As McDonough
was talking to me about Leibniz and a world of
possibilities, I found my mind drifting to an old
movie called Diner, which I’m more familiar with.
“If you don’t have good dreams... you got night-
mares,” Mickey Rourke’s character says toward the
end, as he and his young buddies are heading off
into uncertainty. Maybe they'll grow up success-
fully, maybe not. And maybe, I thought, our whole
species is in that situation—needing a dream to
steer toward, in order to avoid the nightmare.
The circular economy is a dream that’s inspiring
a lot of people to do cool stuff. But—if I may close
this journey with a thud—here’s the thing: It’s not
happening. If you look away from the bright lights
and at the dull numbers, the ones de Wit showed
me, the “circularity gap” is growing, not shrinking.
Our use of natural resources could double by 2050.
Our carbon emissions are still increasing.
“Is it moving fast enough? Not really,” de Wit
said. “All indicators are in the red.”
Like the other optimists I met, de Wit is count-
ing on time. Building a circular economy will
require an enormous cultural shift, on the scale
of the industrial revolution. “You need stamina,”
de Wit said. “My sense is we can’t do it with the
generation in power. It will require a generation to
take off.” That was my generation he was hustling
offstage; I didn’t take it personally, though. Sure,
we'll be pushing up daisies long before the cir-
cular economy arrives. But we'll be doing our bit
for it that way. O
Luca Locatelli’s photos of Dutch agriculture in
the September 2017 issue are on exhibit at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York. Senior editor
Robert Kunzig wrote about cities in April 2019.
THE END OF TRASH _ 71
THh SECRETS
A PHOTOGRAPHER'S EXPERIMENT WITH A WILD NEST YIELDS
UNPRECEDENTED IMAGES SHOWING HOW THE INSECTS
DEFEND THEMSELVES, STAY WARM OR COOL, AND SOCIALIZE.
BY JASON BITTEL | PHOTOGRAPHS BY INGO ARNDT
PREVIOUS PHOTO
With tubular tongues,
western honeybees
in Langen, Germany,
slurp up water to carry
back to their nest,
where it will be used
for climate control.
ABOVE
Bees arrive at their
nest in a tree cavity
created and long
since abandoned by
a black woodpecker.
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Almost as soon
as the honeybee
colony was
installed, it came
under attack.
Not from varroa mites, pesticides, colony
collapse disorder, or any of the many other
perils now facing honeybee populations across
the world, but from hornets—each one a
red-eyed giant next to the hairy little bees.
Each strike took just an instant, the predators
snatching bees out of the air and then flying
away with their victims, which would be
carved up later and fed to the hornets’ own
ravenous larvae.
One-on-one, a western honeybee is no match
for a European hornet. Up to an inch and a half
long, the hornet is equipped with powerful
mandibles capable of shearing smaller insects
to pieces.
For those first few days of the siege, the
honeybees appeared helpless in the face of the
hornet onslaught.
“I thought, Oh God, if this keeps happening,
they will kill my whole colony,” says photogra-
pher Ingo Arndt, whose yard in Langen, Ger-
many, hosts the honeybees.
But as the week wore on, the bees began gain-
ing ground. They started to swarm near the
entrance of the nest, creating a living carpet of
guards. Each time a hornet flew too close, some
of the defenders would leap onto the invader and
tackle it. In an instant, more honeybees would
pile on and pin the hornet down.
Inside this bee ball, something even more
bizarre was taking place. Western honeybees
have a trick in which they can activate their
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flight muscles so rapidly that their thoraxes,
or midsections, radiate small amounts of heat.
When a dozen or more bees rev their engines at
the same time, the cluster can significantly raise
the ambient temperature.
The bees were cooking the hornets alive.
“I find this ingenious,” says Jurgen Tautz,
a recently retired biologist who specialized in
honeybees for about 25 years at the Julius Max-
imilian University of Wiirzburg, in Germany.
The heat trap is a powerful weapon, but it can
also lead to friendly fire. Sometimes the inner-
most bees in the ball die alongside the hornet,
sacrificing themselves for the colony’s defense.
This is just one facet of western honeybee
behavior that Arndt has captured in new detail
over the past two years. He has been photo-
graphing wildlife for 30 years, but he’s no insect
expert, so he partnered with Tautz.
The bee-versus-hornet behavior has been doc-
umented in related species in Asia and has been
seen by western honeybee keepers in Israel and
Egypt, but no one had ever captured the insect
duel quite as Arndt had. “It’s the best photo of
it I’ve ever seen,” says Thomas D. Seeley, a Cor-
nell University professor who has been studying
honeybee behavior and social inter-
actions for half a century.
After the first few battles, Arndt
says, he saw hornets and honey-
bees locked in combat as many
as 10 times a day. If a honeybee
colony is weak, hornets can anni-
hilate it, but for now, the fight in
Arndt’s yard continues as a war of
insect attrition.
There are other factions in this
saga as well. Arndt says honeybees
from nearby colonies often raid the
nest in his backyard in an attempt
to steal its honey, especially toward
the end of summer when flowers
become less available.
AFTER ACCOMPANYING SCientists
through the forests of Germany’s Hainich
National Park as they studied bees in the wild,
Arndt got hooked. But he realized that he’d never
truly unlock the insects’ secrets while watching
them in an artificial box engineered by humans
for the purpose of extracting honey. What he
really wanted was to photograph a natural nest.
This is no small feat. Even if you put ona
82 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
OM
Americans who rank
bees as first among
a list of species
they most want
to save, according to
a National Geographic
and Morning Consult
Poll. The least likely
to be ranked at the
top? Sharks, with zero
first-place votes.
beekeeping suit and climb 60 feet up into the
forest canopy where bees like to nest, as Arndt
did in 2018, “the most exciting stuff is happening
inside the tree,” he says.
So in February 2019, Arndt received permis-
sion from the German forest authorities to go
into a local forest and remove a fallen beech tree
with an abandoned black woodpecker cavity in
its trunk—a treasured home for western honey-
bees. He cut out a piece of the log and arranged
for it to be sent to his garden.
Arndt set to work building a four-walled,
plywood photographer’s blind up against the
200-pound hunk of wood, complete with light-
ing and a tiny window, which allowed him to
sneak his macro lens through the back of the
cavity. He then extracted the queen from a
nearby colony of western honeybees and placed
her inside the woodpecker burrow. All he had
to do was wait in the blind with his finger on
the shutter button.
Within moments, scout bees from the queen’s
original colony lit on the rim of the woodpecker
burrow. More bees landed and then more, until
the log hummed with tens of thousands of the
wild, social insects. The entire colony soon moved
itself into the woodpecker cavity.
Over six months, Arndt shot
more than 60,000 pictures, creating
a portrait of wild honeybees unlike
anything seen before.
“That is what makes this very
special,” Seeley says. Ornitholo-
gists have used similar techniques
to study birds, but no one studying
bees in the wild had done this.
Hundreds of hours in the blind
paid off. When it was warm out,
Arndt watched as bees made
repeated trips to a nearby water
source that he provided, where
they would suck up the liquid
with strawlike tongues and then
fly back to the nest. Inside, they
passed the water to another group
of bees, known as water spreaders, whose job is
to regurgitate the liquid onto the combs, where
it evaporates and creates a cooling effect. The
process can be accelerated when other bees fan
their wings to increase airflow to make the water
evaporate faster. Called evaporative cooling, it’s
essentially what happens when you sweat and
then sit in front of a fan.
Over six months, Arndt shot more than
60,000 pictures, creating a portrait of wild
honeybees unlike anything seen before.
Honeybees often lock legs with each other
when working in their nest. The living chains are
especially important while building combs because
the temperature must be at least 95 degrees
Fahrenheit to keep the beeswax soft and workable.
When the temperatures outside dipped, the
honeybees grabbed hold of each other’s legs
to form a living quilt along the surface of the
combs. Tautz likens the structure to a sleeping
bag, but one in which the fabric’s weave—made
of interlocked bees—can be loosened or tight-
ened to adjust the temperature.
IN SOME CASES, Arndt and Tautz were able to
explain behaviors that beekeepers have long
puzzled over. One mystery was why the insects
would gnaw at the wood of their boxes without
any appreciable effect. Inside the tree, they
found, the behavior makes more sense.
“They scratch all the loose particles from
inside the surface of the hollow,” Tautz says.
Not only might this behavior remove potential
pathogens, such as fungal buildups, but it also |
| creates a smooth surface onto which other bees
can apply a shellac known as propolis.
“Propolis is a secretion produced by the buds of
trees in spring,” Tautz says. “It’s very sticky, but
| bees collect it because it is antifungal and anti-
bacterial. It’s part of the pharmacy of the forest.”
Other moments were captured for the first
time, such as when Arndt photographed a
honeybee opening a pheromone-emitting gland
in midflight.
“Nobody has ever shown that before,” Seeley
says. He hopes these intimate photos will open
people’s eyes to the mostly hidden beauty of
wild bees.
“We're so used to seeing bees or thinking of
bees living in a square white box,” Seeley says.
“And that’s how they live for beekeepers. But
it’s not how they lived for millions of years on
_ their own.” O
—EEEEEEEEEEEEExcCcL~sSESE_SS_SSS=
Jason Bittel writes frequently for natgeo.com;
this is his first story in the magazine. Ingo Arndt's
book with Jurgen Tautz, Honey Bees: Mysterious
Forest Dwellers, publishes this spring.
THE SECRETS OF BEES 83
Init ABUULTIUN
UF 276 NIGERIAN
SUHUOLGIRLS
JUTRAGEL
Tht WORLD,
IZ ARE STILL MISSING.
Int SURVIVURS
Ant RECLAIMING
Hneln FUTURE,
BY NINA STROCHLIC
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENEDICTE KURZEN
Esther Usman stands The young women
behind the dormi- are preparing for
tory in northeastern admission to university
Nigeria where she and and are planning
more than a hundred careers in business,
other students from medicine, and
Chibok live and study. human rights law.
85
On April 14, 2014, a total of 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from their dorms in Chibok, a city in north-
eastern Nigeria, by the militant group Boko Haram. The girls’ plight drew worldwide attention. Today,
112 of the young women remain missing. Most of the survivors are studying at the New Foundation
86 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
School (NFS), a college-preparatory program at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) in Yola.
Among them are (clockwise from top left): Awa Abuga, Glori Aji, Mwada Baba, Yana Joshua, Kume
Ishaku, and Grace Paul. They posed for portraits in a makeshift studio in their dorm’s recreation room.
CHIBOK SCHOOLGIRLS 87
SAMBISA
FOREST
RESERVE ys
Chibok® —
tr uu
Abuja Yola
PATIENCE BULUS AND *
ESTHER JOSHUA HELD HANDS
Ad TreY Went MARCHED OU
Ur TEI DORM RUUM Al
GUNPUINT THAT APRIL NiGhT
Herded into the back of an open-bed truck, they lost their
grip on each other. Amid the mass of frightened students,
Patience heard Esther’s soft voice ask, “What will happen?”
Then someone jumped off the side. Suddenly other girls
were tumbling into the darkness, willing to risk being shot
or lost in the unknown forest to flee their captors. Patience
looked next to her, but Esther had been pulled deeper into
the truck. Patience pushed her way to the edge and jumped
without Esther.
For five years a rebel insurgency in northeastern Nigeria
had terrorized the region and shut down schools. The Govern-
ment Secondary School for girls in Chibok had reopened in
April 2014 for students to take their final exams. In a region
where less than half of all girls attend primary school, these
students had defied the odds they were born into long before
the war reached them. But around 11 p.m. on April 14, trucks of
militants from Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates to
“Western education is forbidden,” forced 276 girls from their
dorms onto trucks and drove toward the lawless cover of the
Sambisa forest, a nature reserve the jihadist group had taken
over to wage a bloody war against the government.
The attack sparked #BringBackOurGirls, an international
campaign embraced by then US. First Lady Michelle Obama. =—_——e
Chibok, a remote, little-known town before the kidnappings, oe . cas
came to represent some of Nigeria’s most crucial issues— rated this photo, wan-
corruption, insecurity, the invisibility of the poor. Media dering in the Sambisa
covered every development: The 57 girls who escaped early Forest Reserve in 2016.
: : ; She was the first of the
on; the ordeal of 10 of the girls who wound up in multiple missing schoolgirls to
American schools; videos released by Boko Haram showing be rescued. Later that
sullen captives; two emotional releases of a total of 103 girls, year the government
: : : negotiated for the
reportedly in exchange for money and prisoners; four girls
release of 21 girls, and
who are said to have fled later on their own. then 82 more in 2017.
88 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NGM MAPS
Students from Chibok for university entrance
take pictures on the exams. Fifteen students
last day of class before — have graduated from
final exams and then the NFS program and
summer recess. The are studying at AUN.
rigorous academic Some return to NFS
schedule prepares them weekly as mentors.
So
Of the 276 Chibok students kidnapped, 112 are
still missing. Some are believed to be dead. Two
and a half years ago, the government arranged
for more than a hundred survivors to study at
a tightly controlled campus in northeastern
Nigeria. Since then, there’s been relative silence.
PATIENCE SPENT THE SUMMER after the abduction
in her village of Askira, listening to gospel music
and coming to terms, she says, with the idea that
the attack had ended her education. Esther’s
mother came to visit once, but Patience wasn’t
at home. Journalists wanted to know what hap-
pened that night; parents asked if she’d seen
their missing daughters. Repeating the story of
April 14 had become exhausting.
Patience and nine other survivors accepted an
offer to study in the United States. She embraced
the opportunity, even though neighbors in her
village warned her parents that young women
get into trouble far from home.
Around the same time Patience was preparing
to move abroad, a school security guard visited
Margee Ensign, president of the American Uni-
versity of Nigeria (AUN) campus in Yola, a city
of several hundred thousand people. She told
Ensign that her sister and 56 other girls had
escaped shortly after the attack.
Some had jumped from the trucks, grabbed
tree branches, twisted their ankles, and then run
until they found help. Others, such as Mary K.
(who asked that only her last initial be used),
had ridden with the kidnappers for hours.
When the truck stopped, Mary conspired with
her classmates in their local dialect: They'd split
into groups of two, ask to use the bathroom, and
then run. The kidnappers, arguing among them-
selves, failed to find them. It took Mary 24 hours
to get home, and when she finally did, she found
her village engulfed in fighting.
Ensign and her staff drove to Chibok and
returned with two vans of survivors who wanted
to continue their education at AUN.
“We weren't ready,” Ensign recalls. “Boko
Haram was still in the area. But it wasn’t a hard
CHIBOK SCHOOLGIRLS 91
O
I
a
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ra
©
O
Lu
©
a
<
Zz
O
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N
oO
On Sundays, the young _ their studies in the fall.
women attend aservice — In this region, less
at AUN. At the end than half of all girls
of the academic year, attend primary school.
Pastor Raymond It’s not uncommon
Obindu urged them for students to leave
to return and resume school to get married.
——
decision.” Two dozen students settled into the
university’s campus, encircled by a high wall and
secured by guards in crisp, red uniforms. They
attended the New Foundation School (NFS),
a tailor-made program to prepare the young
women from Chibok for college.
OVER THE NEXT TWO YEARS, none of the missing
students were released. Rumors of nightmare
conditions in captivity—forced marriages,
enslavement, starvation—were omnipresent.
Then, in May 2016, Chibok student Amina Ali
escaped from the forest with her baby. Five
months later, Nigeria’s government reportedly
offered Boko Haram cash and prisoners for the
release of 21 girls. Severely malnourished, they
were taken to a hospital in Abuja, the capital, to
be assessed by a psychiatrist, physician, sports
therapist, imam, and social worker. They said
the militants had given them a choice: Convert
to Islam and marry, or become slaves. Most chose
slavery, the media reported.
In May 2017, 82 more girls were released. Their
tearful reunion with their parents was broadcast
around the world. In the U.S., Patience Bulus
watched news footage, scanning the names
of those rescued. Her heart leaped when she
landed on Esther Joshua.
Patience recalled the day Esther transferred
to Chibok from another school. Patience had
sized her up and decided she’d make a perfect
sidekick: They were from the same tribe and in
their next-to-last year in school. Soon they were
inseparable and planned to spend part of the
summer of 2014 together at Esther’s house.
When Patience learned that her 103 recently
freed classmates would join those studying at
AUN, she texted a friend: When Esther arrives
in Yola, tell her to call me.
In September 2017, AUN went from housing
and educating 24 Chibok students to 130. The
young women settled into a quiet existence of
studying and praying. Esther was intimidated
by the busy campus. In Chibok, there had been
no laptops or yoga or karaoke nights. In Yola,
CHIBOK SCHOOLGIRLS 93
recreation rooms were outfitted with televisions,
plush couches, and motivational sayings painted
on the walls. The dorm was divided into four
“houses,” each named for a famous woman.
Soon after Esther arrived, another student
passed on Patience’s message. On the phone,
Esther told Patience everything that had hap-
pened in the forest and swore her to secrecy.
“Don’t let it stop you,” Patience advised. “This is
our best opportunity to make something good.”
IN A FOUR-BED DORM ROOM, Esther stacked
her new books onto shelves and emptied her
suitcase into the wardrobe. Her new computer
quickly filled up with selfies and pictures that
94 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Patience sent over WhatsApp.
At first the new students kept to themselves,
eating in their own building and going to the
gym early on Saturdays. Before long, they began
dining in the main cafeteria, and some attended
classes in the library.
But they are not regular students. Boko Haram
pledged to kill them if they returned to school.
Guards watch their building and follow them
whenever they leave. On campus they have a
24/7 support system: 11 student affairs “aunties”
who live in the dorms, a nurse, and a walk-in
psychologist’s office. Some have bullets and
shrapnel still lodged in their bodies. One has a
prosthetic leg. Another walks with a cane. Most
After Esther Joshua (at studying in the U.S.
left) was released from Patience urged Esther
captivity, she received to seize her second
a call from her friend chance at life. “This is
Patience Bulus, who our best opportunity
escaped during the to make something
abduction and is now good,” she said.
et
spent nearly three years in captivity and wrestle
with lingering trauma.
AUN officials say the protection is necessary.
But some see it as sheltering them. “After they
were first released, they were kept together by
the government in some facility in Abuja. After
that they were shipped off to AUN,” said Anietie
Ewang, the Nigeria researcher at Human Rights
Watch who has closely followed the case. “It feels
like at every stage they’ve been secluded.”
The Nigerian government and private donors
are covering the costs of at least six years of
education for each of them. Some are eyeing
law school. Others plan to become actresses,
writers, accountants. Fifteen students have
graduated from the NFS high school program
and are studying at the university. Mary K., who
escaped on the day after the kidnapping, arrived
on campus in 2014, unable to speak English.
After two years, she was accepted to AUN. The
transition wasn’t easy. She knew other students
gossiped about her, and thought about transfer-
ring to another school. Now she roams campus
and seems to know everyone. Once a week she
mentors a group of NFS students on how to man-
age their time, perfect their English, and pass
the three standardized tests they need for AUN
admission. This year she’s spending a semester
abroad, in Rome.
Not all the survivors of Boko Haram’s war have
such opportunities. In Borno State, the epicenter
of the crisis, classes were canceled for two years.
There and in two neighboring states, roughly
500 schools have been destroyed, 800 are closed,
and more than 2,000 teachers have been killed.
Fifteen miles from AUN’s campus, Gloria
Abuya gets up at 5 a.m. and walks two hours
to school from the 2,100-person camp for dis-
placed people where she lives. When Boko
Haram militants first arrived in Gloria’s home-
town of Gwoza in 2014, they killed the men and
ordered their wives to bury the bodies. Later,
they took the girls. Gloria spent two months in
captivity before escaping one night as her cap-
tors prayed.
Many women held prisoner by Boko Haram
return to communities that fear them and fami-
lies that shun them. Gloria doesn’t know when, if
ever, she can resume her old life. “There’s noth-
ing left at home to go back to,” she said.
In May 2019, a week before the start of their
summer vacation, the Chibok students prepared
to mark the anniversary of their release from
captivity. “It’s very sad because we remember
our sisters in the forest,” said Amina Ali, as she
dressed for dinner after a day of rehearsals for
the day’s events. “And here we are, happy.”
The next day the drama club performed a play
in which two girls were kidnapped for ransom
and their families fought to bring them back.
The script poked fun at ineffective police, lazy
elected officials, and greedy kidnappers. When
the captives were freed and reunited with their
families, the audience burst into applause. At the
end, a row of students read messages for their
missing classmates before a balloon release.
“Dear sister, I know the angels are watching
over you.”
“Dear sister, I feel you walk beside me.”
“Dear sister, I can’t wait to see you again.”
Three families of missing girls who live in
Abuja say they have no number to call for
updates, have no warning before news comes out,
and have had no contact with the government
since a tense meeting with President Muham-
madu Buhari in 2016. The government now rarely
comments. Last April, the fifth anniversary of the
abduction, Buhari released a message assuring
Nigerians that “diverse efforts are being inten-
sified to secure the release of the Chibok girls.”
Ona small hill behind a neighborhood of
embassies and mansions in Abuja, Rebecca
Samuel lives in a crammed cinder block home.
Her daughter Sarah is among the students still
missing. Three pictures she keeps in her purse
show Sarah as a five-year-old graduating kinder-
garten, a sassy 14-year-old, and a serious teen
dressed in white. When 82 girls were released in
2017, Samuel rushed to the hospital where they
were held. Security wouldn’t let her in.
AS SUMMER 2019 APPROACHED, AUN got word
that militants had burned down the houses of
several Chibok students’ families. The head
of security, Lionel Rawlins, discouraged the
young women from returning home, but 90 or
so decided to go anyway. For some, it was only
the second summer since their release, and they
CHIBOK SCHOOLGIRLS 95
96 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Last May, students and about a fictitious
faculty gathered to cel- kidnapping. At the
ebrate the anniversary end, the girls let go of
of the students’ release balloons, including 112
from Boko Haram. The black balloons—one for
event included poems, — each of their missing
speeches, and a play classmates.
———
were desperate to see their families.
AUN worries about more than security:
Most of these women are in their 20s, and in
this region it’s unusual for them to still be in
school. If they hadn’t spent years in captivity,
many would be starting families. The previous
fall, eight students didn’t return to school, and
half of those were said to have gotten married.
On the Sunday before they left for home, a
pastor joined them for a sermon. “Some of you
have passed through terrible things, through the
shadow of death,” he preached.
“AMEN!” they replied.
“Some of you are about to travel. Some of you
are afraid.” His pitch climbed. “Do not be afraid!
If you live in fear, you are attracting danger.”
Grace Dodo, a statuesque student who walks
with a cane, tilted her head and joined in: “Yes!”
“I want you to go and come back and finish
your education,” the pastor said.
While Esther Joshua packed for a trip to see
her family, Patience Bulus spent the summer far
from home, on the idyllic campus of Dickinson
College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 2018 former
AUN president Margee Ensign opened a college-
prep program at Dickinson, where she’s now
president. She enrolled four Chibok survivors.
Patience studied quietly, blending in among
the international students. Then in April 2019
she spoke on a panel at the U.S. Capitol about
the crisis in Nigeria. Soon, Dickinson students
began to recognize her broad smile and colorful
hair wraps on campus. They'd approach and ask
to hear her story. She'll tell it now. Why not? She
plans to study psychology and become a thera-
pist or work with refugees. She’s stopped going
to therapy sessions herself and has started see-
ing a career counselor.
“T’ll never forget,” Patience said, “but I’ve
started to pretend like I forget. I have to move
on with my life.” O
ee
Nina Strochlic is a National Geographic staff
writer. Bénédicte Kurzen is a French photog-
rapher who focuses on West Africa and the
Middle East.
CHIBOK SCHOOLGIRLS 97
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PREVIOUS PHOTO
Trainers with the
Sen-zu No Sarumawashi
reX-lacelanat-lala-me [cele] e)
in Kawasaki take their
diapered charges
on daily walks in the
streets. In the earliest
stage of sarumawashi
((aakeyal <-yval eX-]acelanar-larex-))
training, baby monkeys
are taught to sit on tiny
stools. Gradually they
learn to walk on stilts
and vault over hurdles.
THIS PHOTO
After patrons in
Kayabuki Tavern,
in Utsonomiya, have
finished eating, the
owners’ pet monkeys
climb onto a make-
shift stage at the back
of the restaurant and
obediently model a
foto} | =Tetdre}a me) im f=] ©) (=) a
maché masks.
WILDLIFE WATCH
The
onke
wore
soccer
uniforms.
Six Japanese macaques standing erect on
leashes obediently kicked the ball up and
down the turf as their human trainers anda
crowd of spectators cheered them on in a mock
Japan-versus-Brazil match.
The monkeys in blue jerseys (Japan) looked
sturdier, with fat tails sticking through the holes
cut in their pants, but Brazil’s yellow lineup was
quick—especially when player 10 stopped lick-
ing its hands. Suddenly, 10 got the ball, kicked,
and scored. Victory! Japan’s team bowed. And
the crowd exploded in laughter.
This was just one of the warm-up acts to
the main event in the indoor amphitheater at
Japan’s Nikko Saru Gundan, a roadside attrac-
tion off Route 121 in Nikko City. Wandering
around the courtyard, I saw a macaque in diapers
and an orange leisure suit trounce a five-year-old
visitor in a game of air hockey. Every time the
puck came its way, the monkey smacked it back
toward the challenger’s goal. Another monkey
doled out fortunes. On the main outdoor stage, a
102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
At Joshin’etsukogen
National Park, in a
volcanic region on the
island of Honshu, “snow
monkeys" lounge in
hot springs. Years ago,
after people began
feeding the monkeys
to draw them away
from their farms and
houses, the animals
became a popular
tourist attraction. Park
staff feed them today.
male macaque in a kimono struck macho poses
and leaped over high hurdles.
Soon it was time to line up at the amphithe-
ater, where a woman named Yuria Suzuki and
her faithful primate, Riku, were headlining a
parody of a popular Japanese police show and
a circus act. When Sergeant Suzuki pretended to
dispatch Captain Riku to a reported crime scene,
he ducked behind the curtain and returned with
a butcher knife—a rubber prop—in his head. In
the circus finale, Riku, in blue polka-dot pants
and a pink satin vest, vaulted across a chasm
between staircases and executed a one-armed
handstand on a tall, swaying pole.
The presentation at Nikko Saru Gundan has
roots in traditional Japanese culture. The acts
evolved from a form of entertainment known as
sarumawashi, monkey performance, based on
the belief that the saru (monkey) is the protector
of horses and the mediator between gods and
humans, capable of dispelling evil spirits and
clearing the path for good fortune. Like Kabuki,
sarumawashi was performed in public theaters
as long as a thousand years ago.
But in a modernizing Japan, the spiritual sig-
nificance has faded.
Today’s monkey performances resemble
circus acts. Many animals are schooled using
positive reinforcement and affection, but some
are harshly disciplined and physically abused
by their trainers, said Keiko Yamazaki, execu-
tive director of the Animal Literacy Research
Institute and a board member of the Japanese
Coalition for Animal Welfare. Yet diapered mon-
keys waddling across stages in Japan have not
gotten the same attention as, say, bears that ride
CULTURE, OR ABUSE? 103
Tourists watch the staff
at Arashiyama Monkey
Park Iwatayama, out-
side Kyoto, feed wild
Japanese macaques.
STU Tel am ol geyalylelal late Marek
helped boost monkey | —
numbers. They're so as
abundant now that _
more than 19,000 are
Kali t-xe mam aat-muvl te M-s-Te18)
year to prevent the
aliar-lcmicelanme-lieliare]
farmers’ crops.
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JOSHIN’ETSUKOGEN +
NATIONAL PARK:
Jigokudani Monkey P ark |
v. Sen-zu No
Zs) 2 Sarumawashi
Arashiyama wes
Monkey Park
Iwatayama
; —A subspecies of macaque once
:
Yak Shige found on the island of Tanega Shima
has been extinct since the 1950s.
motorbikes in high-wire acts in China. Captive
monkeys are protected under Japan’s animal
welfare law, but the legislation emphasizes the
treatment of common domestic pets.
“A lot of the welfare groups lobby for the kit-
tens and the puppies—they want no-kill shelters.
The cat ladies get a bigger following,” Yamazaki
said. “Our goal is to make Japan’s animal welfare
law applicable to all animals—farm animals, zoo
animals, lab animals.”
Japan has a long history of using animals for
entertainment, but sensitivities toward a cul-
tural tradition shouldn’t prevent performing
monkeys from being protected from abuse, she
said. “It’s like the circus. When you go back in
history, you see animals have been trained using
extremely abusive methods, and the monkey
business is no exception. But culture evolves—
it’s not set in stone.”
The 21st-century versions of sarumawashi
range from monkeys turning backflips in frilly
dresses at street festivals to Nikko Saru Gundan’s
primate pupils pretending to do math calcula-
tions and playing the piano in videos posted to
YouTube. On a nine-day tour of sarumawashi
culture, I saw a range of productions and vis-
ited a bar in Utsunomiya, nearly two hours north
of Tokyo, where monkeys serve cold beers and
warm hand towels and wear papier-maché
masks, including one that resembled US. pres-
ident Donald Trump.
106 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
ASIA 7 f iy
a »- > 3
& aes or
| Pp»
UT ivees of macaques
live as far north as the
* Shimokita Peninsula.
Range of
Japanese macaque
(Macaca fuscata)
® Confirmed
™ Likely
200 mi
200 km
Chiemi Shiina,
a sarumawashi
monkey trainer,
takes a bath with
three baby macaques,
the newest members
of her Sen-zu No
Sarumawashi entertain-
ment group. Sen-zu
trainers often sleep
with the babies,
building bonds with
the animals as they
grow into performers.
IN NATURE, Japanese macaques, also known as
snow monkeys, are hardy creatures. No other
nonhuman primate lives at such northern lat-
itudes. At Jigokudani Monkey Park, roughly
2,800 feet above sea level and a three-and-a-half-
hour drive northwest of Tokyo, all those familiar
images in magazines and nature documentaries
of frosted snow monkeys lounging in hot springs
come to life before throngs of tourists snapping
wildlife photos and selfies.
Despite their nickname, Japanese macaques
are found throughout most of the country,
including subtropical forests in the southern
part of their range. They’re true omnivores, eat-
ing everything from plants and fruits to insects,
bark, and dirt. That varied diet has put them in
some farmers’ crosshairs.
Every year, engai, monkey damage, costs
JOHN KAPPLER, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: JAPAN WILDLIFE RESEARCH
CENTER; MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN
millions of dollars in lost crops—mostly fruits
and vegetables. Growers use fencing, scare-
crows, and pyrotechnics to deter monkeys. In
some municipalities, farmers can file complaints
with agencies that manage programs to trap and
kill nuisance animals. As a result, more than
19,000 monkeys are killed in Japan annually,
according to the Ministry of the Environment.
A byproduct of those eradication programs can
be orphaned young monkeys, sometimes col-
lected by concerned citizens and passed along
to entertainment groups.
One afternoon near Yamaguchi, on a sloping
hillside where a man was tending his koi pond,
I took a short walk on a country path with Shuji
Murasaki, 72. He stopped and motioned toward
a large empty metal cage about the size of four
school buses, in a field. It was a trap designed to
lure crop-raiding monkeys with food.
The village had captured about 10 monkeys
the previous week, Murasaki said. He didn’t
know what happened to them—they probably
were shot, though he wished they’d been sent to
a zoo. Two tiny rescued monkeys found a home
with his son, Kohei, who would train them to be
performers, he said.
Murasaki, a human rights activist and former
actor, was among a small group of people who
revived traditional sarumawashi when it had vir-
tually disappeared in the 1960s. Now he’s retired
and has passed his practice of staying true to
sarumawashi’s spiritual roots to Kohei. The per-
formances they offer embrace the original East-
ern ideas, Murasaki explained. “The animals are
mediators between the audience and God—it’s
not just a monkey show, it’s a ceremony.”
CULTURE, OR ABUSE? 107
At Kayabuki Tavern,
Nis / diners laugh while
| AES" i clapping for at
; ow ous" ti monkeys. When the
i a I performance is over,
PS customers ask to have
ss id at-1/am o)alelnete | é-] ©) as
| ) taken with the animals.
\ The tavern owners say
that sharing of photos
ite eh ' " on social media has
2 ft been good for business.
Some online review-
. no —— ers, however, question
oy ay — SS id at-M odg-teid(e-Rolmnal-] <lale}
a ge a = = a ~— 7 : natoyal <-yeN eX-aielann ae
~ a ee ey | a
ee J
SS —
nee: —
te 5
——
Kaoru Amagai
lives in a traditional
Japanese home in Ota,
Gunma, with three
pet macaques. He says
he treats the monkeys
ism aX-muelel(omealielaslay
dressing them (he has
a hundred pieces of
rol fol daliatep ym os-14aliate maal-a0F
Tate Mi-\-xel late maal-lanmersliNg
yogurt snacks. He also
says the chain in the
ike) g-re] celUl ale mim xen ale) le)
id aM antelal con acwne [f=] eL-163
in place.
In Japanese beliefs, every animal has a route
to provide good fortune, he continued, and in
the traditional sarumawashi act, each monkey
trick has meaning. When the trainer spins the
animal by the arms, the performance area is
purified. When a monkey leaps through two
hoops, it is spreading health and long life. Hav-
ing monkeys walk on stilts extends wishes to
children for wellness and happiness.
It’s not easy training the animals to do such
complicated stunts, Murasaki said. Even basic
sarumawashi tricks can take more than a year to
learn. The first step is teaching the monkey to sit
onasmall stool, he said. The trainer presents the
stool and taps for the monkey to take a seat. If
the monkey obliges, the trainer showers it with
praise and affection. Next comes bipedal walk-
ing. “Very unnatural for monkeys,” Murasaki
emphasized, which is why it can take months of
leading the monkey by its hands until the animal
starts doing this on command.
Gradually, trainer and monkey work toward
more elaborate moves and gymnastics. Tiny
stilts are mastered, then replaced with taller
ones. Murasaki and his son allow the monkeys to
take the lead, he said, because the alternative—
screaming or hitting—would discourage trust.
Training methods vary, however. On my visit
to Nikko Saru Gundan, Tsuyoshi Oikawa, a
trainer there for 20 years, told me that tradition-
ally animal handlers used dominance to teach
the monkeys that humans outranked them. To
establish a pecking order, they’d yell and some-
times even bite the monkeys. He said he uses
positive reinforcement through play combined
with oral discipline. “We treat them like our kids.
If they do good performances, we say well done.
But if they don’t, we scold them.”
Around the world, attractions such as Nikko
Saru Gundan face an increasing backlash from
those morally opposed to keeping wild animals
in captivity and exploiting them for entertain-
ment. “The world is outraged by gimmicky ani-
mal acts, which is why so many animal circuses
are closing their doors and countries are banning
them,” said Jason Baker, senior vice president
of international campaigns with People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals. “Sadly, history
has shown us that we can’t rely on governments
to protect animals, especially in countries like
Japan, where animal welfare laws are weak. No
one monitors living conditions, preproduction
training sessions, maternal separation, or what
112 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Traditional sarumawashi
performances feature
a trainer coaching
a monkey through
acrobatic stunts. The
main stage at Nikko
Saru Gundan special-
izes in glitzier, scripted
productions with up
to six monkeys, elabo-
rate sets, and multiple
costume changes.
Globally, such attrac-
tions are increasingly
controversial because
of concern for the
animals’ welfare.
SSS
happens to animals when they’re no longer used
by the entertainment industry.”
But Oikawa said that people critical of the
attraction’s animal ethics don’t understand
Japan’s sarumawashi culture. “We love mon-
keys—we’re on their side,” he said. “We don’t
use abusive training methods.”
SATOSHI HARADA was a trainer who used to work
in monkey shows before becoming director and
head animal coach of a monkey act company
called Sen-zu No Sarumawashi, which stages
shows at street festivals, schools, and parties.
When I met him at the company’s office in Kawa-
saki, he said he wanted to avoid stressful training
methods by focusing more on positive reinforce-
ment and affection, including even sleeping with
the animals when they’re very young.
b aN
=,
'
,
y :
4
zyvF
Ri, £
! pr
/ ° ey
4745,
———_ °* Pw
We stepped into his troupe’s practice room,
where Harada introduced me to his colleagues
and their furry collaborators dressed in dia-
pers, including four new babies. He explained
that the group keeps a rigorous training
schedule—two hours in the morning and two
hours in the afternoon, except on days when the
monkeys are performing.
Earlier that morning, I’d marveled at the ani-
mals’ acrobatics during a show for 300 toddlers
who were sitting with their legs crisscross in a
preschool gymnasium. The star of the show was
Ponzo, wearing a bright yellow vest and a black
jumpsuit. The children squealed with delight as
the monkey nailed his tricks, striding across the
auditorium on stilts that towered above Harada
and even catapulting over a boy who had volun-
teered to sit in a chair. “Ankoru! Ankoru!” the
| children yelled. “Encore! Encore
> —*- - *-
3
!
Now back at the Sen-zu office, the trainers
stripped off the monkeys’ diapers and shut
them into red metal cages, where they live
when not performing. Then the trainers set
about their end-of-day routines: scrubbing foul-
smelling feces off the metal drip trays beneath
the cages and preparing bowls of oranges,
apples, and bananas for the monkeys’ dinner.
They placed the bowls in a row on the floor
and in unison presented the food to their per-
formers. It was five o’clock, time to go home.
They’d be back before breakfast to prepare for
the next show. 0
Rene Ebersole writes about animals and wildlife
crime for National Geographic. Jasper Doest won
the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Photo-
| journalist story award for this project.
CULTURE, OR ABUSE? 113
These women
have helped
pave the
way for new
generations
of National
Geographic
explorers,
(acolnih (lim xedatelalmmce)ohced oleacelii))
Asha de Vos
=} fo} Melcil—as
Maria Mitchell
ASTRONOMER
Electa ‘Exy’ Johnson
Ella Al-Shamahi
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Marion Stirling Pugh
rU ately Ne] Melcii—as
Jocelyn Crane Griffin
fey-N teil, fe] Relcil—as
Gloria Hollister Anable
Tel week de) Selcil—as
Else Bostelmann
ARTIST
Dickey Chapelle
PHOTOGRAPHER
Evgenia Arbugaeva
PHOTOGRAPHER
Barbara Washburn
CARTOGRAPHER
Reina Torres de Aratiz
AM te) te) Melcii-gs
Marie Tharp
[oj fe] Relcil—aa
Munazza Alam
ASTROPHYSICIST
Rae Wynn-Grant
|=fefe}] Helcii—as
Jess Cramp
CONSERVATIONIST
Biruté Galdikas
ad a UP ee) elci ies
Harriet Chalmers Adams
EXPLORER
Liliana Gutiérrez Mariscal
=} fe} Melcil—as
114
TRAILBLAZERS
BY NINA STROCHLIC | ARCHIVAL RESEARCH BY SARA MANCO
Women: A Century of Change
A YEARLONG SERIES
E SURE YOU'RE THE FIRST woman
somewhere,” an editor advised
budding photographer Dickey
Chapelle as World War II esca-
lated. Chapelle took the advice and
sneaked ashore with a Marine unit
during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, flouting a ban on
female journalists in combat zones. She temporarily lost
her military press accreditation but went on to earn a
reputation as a fearless war correspondent.
Since National Geographic’s founding in 1888, women
have churned out achievements in science and explora-
tion, often with only fleeting recognition. They mapped
the ocean floor, conquered the highest peaks, unearthed
ancient civilizations, set deep-sea diving records, and
flew around the world. They talked their way onto wars’
front lines and traveled across continents.
“There is no reason why a woman cannot go wherever
a man goes, and further,” explorer Harriet Chalmers
Adams said in 1920. “If a woman be fond of travel, if
she has love of the strange, the mysterious, and the lost,
there is nothing that will keep her at home.”
Yet in the magazine women were often a side note,
overshadowed by famous husbands. Matthew Stirling’s
byline was on more than a dozen articles detailing his
discoveries in Mesoamerican archaeology, but his wife,
Marion, who helped run the expeditions, had only one
story published under her own byline: on keeping house
in the field. “Damn, damn, damn!” a frustrated Anne
Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her diary in 1933, about life
with her famous aviator husband, Charles. She was the
first American woman to earn a glider pilot’s license,
and she won awards for her navigation skills. “I am sick
of being this ‘handmaiden to the Lord.”
Others were ignored by contemporaries. When
geographer Marie Tharp offered proof of the theory of
tectonic plate shift in the early 1950s, a colleague dis-
missed it as “girl talk.” At least one, 1920s-era journalist
Juliet Bredon, found it easier to publish in National
Geographic under a man’s name. Even world-renowned
women of their time, such as 19th-century astronomer
Maria Mitchell, struggled to get fair pay.
National Geographic’s archive holds millions of
photographs and documents from stories, research
grants, and films since the Society’s start. Stacks of
microfiche filled with faded manuscripts and folders
of typewritten correspondence reveal the stories of
National Geographic’s trailblazing women. From the
past to the present, we salute some of them here.
114 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
=
Maria Mitchell
1818-1889
First person to discover a comet
by telescope; first woman
to work as a professional
astronomer in the U.S.
In the 1800s, residents of Nantucket,
Massachusetts, famously kept their
telescopes trained on the sea, await-
ing the return of local whaling and
fishing boats. Maria Mitchell turned
hers to the stars. Mitchell grew up
helping her father, an amateur astron-
omer, make complex navigational
calculations for whaling captains,
determine eclipse times, and record
movements of astral features.
At 10:30 p.m. on October 1, 1847,
the 29-year-old was on the roof of
the Pacific Bank, where her father
had built a simple observatory.
Wielding her telescope, she spotted
something that wasn’t on her astro-
nomical charts: a comet.
Sixteen years earlier, King Fred-
erick VI of Denmark had offered a
gold medal to the first person to dis-
cover a comet by telescope. Mitch-
| claimed the prize. Her discovery
and ensuing career made her the
rst professional female astronomer
the U.S. Within the year, she was
ected to the American Academy of
rts and Sciences—the first woman
vited to join. She visited observa-
tories around the world and became
an outspoken advocate for women
in science, as well as an abolitionist
and a suffragist.
Mitchell taught astronomy at the
newly opened Vassar College, where
she studied planets, stars, comets,
and eclipses—and fought to be paid
the same as her male colleagues.
Comet 1847-VI, which she'd discov-
ered, became known as Miss Mitch-
ell’s comet. A crater on the moon
was named for her, as was a World
War Il cargo ship, the S.S. Maria
Mitchell. In 1888, a year before Mitch-
ell died, her brother, oceanographer
Henry Mitchell, heloed found the
National Geographic Society.
0)
ran
53> Os
+
PREVIOUS PHOTOS: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
(MITCHELL, LINDBERGH, ANABLE); THOMAS J. ABERCROMBIE
(JOHNSON); RICHARD H. STEWART (PUGH); MILO WOODBRIDGE
WILLIAMS (GRIFFIN); AMADO ARAUZ, COURTESY THE ARAUZ
COLLECTION (TORRES DE ARAUZ); JOHN TEE-VAN
(BOSTELMANN); JOSEPH H. BAILEY (THARP)
The discovery of a comet propelled astronomer
Maria Mitchell (seen at left, about 1880) to celebrity
status in the mid-1800s. She was an advocate for
suffrage and gender equality in science.
SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
—
HARRIE
CHALMERS ADAMS
1875-1937
First female journalist allowed to
visit the French trenches during
WWI; inaugural president of the
Society of Woman Geographers
‘I'VE NEVER FOUND MY SEX
A HINDERMENT; NEVER FACED A
DIFFICULTY WHICH A WOMAN, AS
WELL AS A MAN, COULD NOT
SURMOUNT; NEVER FELT A FEAR
OF DANGER; NEVER LACKED
COURAGE TO PROTECT MYSELF.
I'VE BEEN IN TIGHT PLACES, HAVE
SEEN HARROWING THINGS.’
A close-up of the French front
line shows the rare access
that photographer and writer
Harriet Chalmers Adams had
during World War |. Adams,
who spent decades exploring
the world, was the most
prolific female contributor to
National Geographic during
its first 50 years.
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (TOP);
HARRIET CHALMERS ADAMS
In the 1880s, long before she became
her era’s greatest female explorer,
eight-year-old Harriet Chalmers
traveled through the Sierra Nevada
on horseback with her father. When
she was 24, Chalmers married Franklin
Pierce Adams, and they set off for Latin
America, where they covered 40,000
miles by horse, canoe, foot, and train.
When they returned nearly three years
later, she gave a lecture at National
Geographic and launched a 30-year
career as a contributor.
Adams made it her mission to visit
every country that was or had been a
Spanish colony, and retraced the trail
of Christopher Columbus from Europe
to the Americas. She traversed Asia and
attended Haile Selassie’s coronation
as emperor of Ethiopia. During World
War I, she was the first female journal-
ist allowed to photograph the French
trenches, where she stayed for months.
She wrote 21 articles detailing her
exploits for National Geographic, more
than any other woman published in the
magazine’s first half century. In those
pieces, she criticized the injustices that
she’d observed. “What blessing has
European civilization brought to them,
which they did not already enjoy?”
she wrote after a visit to Peru. “What
have they not suffered in the name of
the cross which surmounts the hill?”
Adams had no professional training
as a geographer and had never been
to college, but her color photo slides
and adventurous travel style garnered
her invitations to speak around the
world, often from organizations that
had never invited a woman in before.
She was the third American woman
asked to join the Royal Geographical
Society in England. However, the New
York-based Explorers Club gave her
and other prominent female adven-
turers the cold shoulder.
Men “have always been so afraid
that some mere woman might pen-
etrate their sanctums of discussion
that they don’t even permit women in
their clubhouses,” Adams once said,
“much less allow them to attend any
meetings for discussions that might
be mutually helpful.”
Several female explorers decided to
form their own club. In 1925 the Society
of Woman Geographers launched with
Adams as president. She served until
moving to France in 1933, where she
died four years later at 61.
TRAILBLAZERS 119
REINA
TORRES DE
ARAUZ
1932-1982
In 1961 an American-owned company
demolished a colonial building called
La Polvora in a coastal city in Pan-
ama to make room for a highway.
Reina Torres de Aratiz, a 29-year-old
anthropologist, was outraged and
complained to Panama’s president,
Roberto Chiari. He listened: Panama
created the National Commission of
Archaeology and Historical Monu-
ments and put Torres de Arauz in
charge of ensuring that important
sites were preserved.
Torres de Arauz was already a well-
known anthropologist and cultural
heritage defender by then. She’d been
tapped to take part in the expedition
to identify the best route through
Panama for the construction of the
Pan-American Highway, which even-
tually would stretch, unofficially in
parts, from Alaska to Chile.
She spent her honeymoon scouting
the road’s path on the Trans-Darien
Expedition, which was documented
by National Geographic. The team left
Panama in a Jeep and a Land Rover |
and ended up in Colombia four months
later, having completed the first motor-
ized crossing from North to South
America.
Her influence on Panama is deeply
ingrained. She founded the archaeo-
logical research center at the Univer-
sity of Panama, set up scholarships to
encourage students to embark on field
research, and created departments
for Panamanian prehistory, ethnogra-
phy, and cultural anthropology. After
serving as the director of the National
Museum of Panama, she helped open
six museums and an archaeology park.
In 1971 Torres de Aratiz became
National Geographic’s first female
Latin American grantee, which gave her
the funding to catalog pre-Columbian
gold artifacts. She successfully pushed
for a law that halted the flow of such
artifacts abroad.
Torres de Arauz died at 49, in 1982,
but her legacy lives on in Panama City,
where a sprawling museum named in
her honor holds 15,000 priceless relics
of Panama’s past.
In 1960 Panamanian
anthropologist Reina Torres
de Arauz (below) was part
of the first team to drive
between North and South
America via the Darién Gap,
which connects Panama
and Colombia.
AMADO ARAUZ, COURTESY THE
ARAUZ COLLECTION
A lifetime of sailing around
the world added up to a trip
to the moon and back for
Electa Johnson (right), on the
Nile River in the early 1960s.
WINFIELD PARKS
Electa
'‘Exy’
Johnson
1909-2004
Circled the globe
seven times with her
husband, Irving
“| don’t suppose
many mothers have
a chance like this!”
Exy said. She was
cooking sperm whale
harpooned by our
18-year-old son, Arthur.
We were cruising
among the Galdpagos
Islands for the sixth
time in twenty years
of voyaging around
the world in the
brigantine Yankee.
This moment, in-
cluded in a draft of a
story Irving and Electa,
or Exy, Johnson co-
authored for National
Geographic in 1959, was
just an average day
on the water for the
seafaring family. By the
time they furled their
sails permanently, the
couple had made seven
circumnavigations of
the world in two ships
named Yankee.
For their circumnavi-
gations, they had a
routine: They‘d sail the
world for 18 months and
then spend 18 months
in the U.S. Other trips
brought them to the
Baltics, down the Nile,
and through Europe's
canals, where Exy used
' some of the several
languages she spoke.
They even participated
in the search for miss-
ing aviator Amelia Ear-
hart in the South Pacific.
The couple wrote nine
stories and numerous
books together, and
made three films for
National Geographic
during more than
4O years at sea.
Irving passed away
in 1991, and when Exy
died in 2004 at age
95, she had sailed the
distance between the
Earth and the moon
and back. Their leg-
acy continues in Los
Angeles, where kids
learn about teamwork
and problem-solving
aboard two brigantines:
the Irving Johnson and
the Exy Johnson.
TRAILBLAZERS 121
—
JOCELYN
CRANE GRIFFIN
1909-1998
Assisted on bathysphere
expedition; researched
fiddler crabs
rISE
BOSTELMANN
1882-1961
Painted marine life
discovered in the deep sea
GLORIA
HOLLISTER
ANABLE
1900-1988
Set world record for
deepest dive by a woman
122 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
In 1930 underwater explorers William
Beebe and Otis Barton were lowered
into the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda
in a tiny steel orb. Above the water,
a group of female scientists ensured
that this bold new contraption—called
the bathysphere—operated without
a hitch. It was the first serious foray
into crewed deep-sea exploration, and
soon it would be international news.
From the boat deck, laboratory
assistant Jocelyn Crane Griffin helped
identify the marine life. At the phone
was Gloria Hollister Anable, the chief
technical associate for the Department
of Tropical Research at what is now the
Wildlife Conservation Society, which
supported the mission. This phone
connection, via a cable that ran from
the vessel to the ship, was Beebe’s only
lifeline to the outside world, and it was
never supposed to go silent. Anable
transcribed Beebe’s observations as
he watched the deep-sea life swim
by and relayed information to him
on depth, time, and weather. They
bantered throughout. She and Griffin
took turns in the bathysphere as well.
Descending 1,208 feet on one of those
dives, Anable set a record for the great-
est depth reached by a woman.
After each dive, Beebe’s sketches
and transcribed descriptions would
be delivered to Else Bostelmann
back at the lab in Bermuda, where
she transformed them into dramatic
paintings. Though she didn’t watch
from inside the bathysphere, she often
would put on a diving helmet, tie her
brushes to a palette of oil paints, and
drag her canvas underwater to paint
and find inspiration. Her drawings
of fantastical marine life—fish with
From thousands of feet
under the sea, William Beebe
described what he saw via
telephone to Gloria Hollister
Anable (seen above at right,
in bathysphere headquarters
in Bermuda). On the ship,
Jocelyn Crane Griffin (at
center) helped identify the
marine life. Later, Else Bostel-
mann (closest to the door)
made fantastical drawings
(left) of the creatures.
JOHN TEE-VAN (ABOVE); ELSE
BOSTELMANN (LEFT, BOTH)
giant fangs, psychedelic crustaceans,
a never-before-seen black-skinned
fish—made the expedition come alive
in National Geographic.
Beebe was mocked for hiring
women, but he stuck by his team.
After the mission ended, Bostelmann
continued to illustrate for National
Geographic, and Anable led a scien-
tific expedition to what is now Guyana.
Griffin went on to manage field stations
in the Caribbean and took Beebe’s job
as director of the Department of Trop-
ical Research after his death in 1962.
In an interview in 1991, underwater
explorer Sylvia Earle was asked what
inspired her to get into oceanography.
She cited Beebe’s tales. “The aquar-
iums of the world, as wonderful and
diverse as they are...do not have the
sort of creatures that Beebe described
from his exploration back in the 1930s,”
she said. “And that certainly I found
utterly inspiring.”
TRAILBLAZERS 123
In the 1930s the boldest
attempt at crewed deep-sea
exploration was conducted
in the steel contraption
called the bathysphere. This
series of record-breaking
expeditions to study marine
life was staffed by Jocelyn
Crane Griffin, Else Bostel-
mann, and Gloria Hollister
Anable (shown here).
JOHN TEE-VAN
124 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
TRAILBLAZERS 125
Barbara Washburn’s sec-
ond ever hike was up the
13,628-foot Mount Hayes,
in 1941. Six years later
she gazed over the Denali
Pass (left), near North
America’s highest peak.
BRADFORD WASHBURN (BOTH)
BARBARA
WASHBURN
1914-2014
First woman to summit Denali;
with husband Bradford Washburn,
mapped the Grand Canyon
‘T HAD NO REAL FEELING
ABOUT BEING A PIONEERING
WOMAN ON A SERIOUS
ALASKAN EXPEDITION.
| ONLY KNEW THAT AS
THE ONLY WOMAN, | HAD
TO MEASURE UP.’
Barbara Washburn’s life atop the
world’s highest peaks began with a
job tip from her mail carrier in 1939.
The position he reeommended—as a
secretary for Bradford Washburn, the
director of the New England Museum
of Natural History—did not appeal to
her. “I don’t want to work in that stuffy
old museum,” she recalled thinking,
“and I certainly wouldn’t want to work
for a crazy mountain climber.”
Ayear later, the young woman who'd
never been camping was standing atop
10,151-foot Mount Bertha in Alaska. She
had married that mountain climber.
One year after that, the couple,
along with their team, became the
first to successfully summit 13,628-foot
Mount Hayes. She wore men’s cold-
weather gear because none was made
for women then. Along a particularly
treacherous ridge, Barbara took the
lead because the team felt she’d be
light enough to haul up if the ground
crumbled beneath her. In 1947, Barbara
and Bradford left their three children at
home to climb Mount McKinley (now
called Denali). After nearly two months
of trekking, Barbara stood on the sum-
mit as the first woman to look out from
North America’s highest point.
Bradford was a trained cartographer,
and the pair took on ambitious map-
ping projects. Starting in 1970, they
used aerial photography, laser mea-
surement tools, and a wheel-mounted
odometer to fully map the Grand Can-
yon for National Geographic. The proj-
ect took seven years and nearly 700
helicopter trips. They also mapped the
White Mountains in New Hampshire
and Mount Denali. In 1988, the couple
were among 15 explorers—including
Edmund Hillary, Jacques-Yves Cous-
teau, and Mary and Richard Leakey—
to receive the National Geographic
Centennial Award. Into their later
years, the Washburns still applied for
grants from National Geographic for
projects such as a snow-depth survey
on Mount Everest.
Barbara died in 2014, seven years
after her husband and just two months
shy of her 100th birthday. She said she
never understood the fuss about her
gender, describing herself instead as
“an accidental mountaineer.”
TRAILBLAZERS 127
Marie
Tharp
1920-2006
World War Il gave Marie
Tharp the chance to
make an earthshaking
discovery. Male stu-
dents were off fighting,
and universities had
desks to fill. Tharp, who
already had degrees
in English and music,
seized the opportunity
to study geology,
a field that had been
hostile to women. After
a stint as a field geol-
ogist for an oil com-
pany, she was hired as
a technical assistant at
Columbia University’s
Lamont Geological
Observatory, where she
met a graduate student
named Bruce Heezen.
Together Tharp and
Heezen embarked on
a bold project: to map
the ocean floor.
Women were barred
from working aboard
scientific research ships
then, so Heezen used
sonar measurements
he collected on ocean
expeditions, including
some funded by
National Geographic.
In a basement office at
Columbia, Tharp trans-
formed the data and
measurements from
hundreds of other
expeditions into maps.
As Tharp worked on
the first map of the
Atlantic Ocean, she
noticed a valley running
across the ocean floor
and concluded that
pieces of the Earth's
crust were shifting. Her
theory of continental
drift was “almost a form
of scientific heresy,”
Tharp would say later.
At first Heezen didn't
accept her theory,
mocking her evidence
as “girl talk.” But her
conclusion was bol-
stered by sonar read-
ings. This crack in the
Earth convinced the
scientific community
that the continents had
been one landmass,
ater separated by
tectonic movement.
Backed by the
U.S. Navy and National
128 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Painstakingly charted sonar
data of the ocean floor
helped geologists Marie
Tharp and Bruce Heezen
prove the then fringe
theory of plate tectonics.
JOE COVELLO
Geographic, the proj-
ect spread from Colum-
bia to Tharp’s home in
South Nyack, New York.
It was published in 1977
as the “World Ocean
Floor” map, the first
global depiction of the
bottom of the oceans.
It revealed a landscape
covered in volcanic
ranges and Everest-
high peaks, split by
a 40,390-mile seam
running along the
Earth's surface.
“It was a once-in-a-
lifetime—a once-in-the-
history-of-the-world—
opportunity for anyone,
but especially for a
woman in the 1940s,”
she wrote.
The year after the
map was published,
Tharp and Heezen won
the Hubbard Medal,
National Geograph-
ic's highest honor,
which recognizes life-
time achievement in
research, discovery,
and exploration.
Tharp opened a map-
distribution business
after she retired from
Columbia. By then,
she finally had made it
aboard a research ves-
sel. She died in 2006.
E BIRUTE GALDIKAS
Born 1946
One of the female scientists
dubbed Trimates mentored
by anthropologist Louis
Leakey; has researched
orangutans since the 1970s
Believing women to possess more
patience and perception than men,
paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey sup-
ported three young female scientists to
live among the great apes. With funding
from National Geographic, he helped
set up field stations for Jane Goodall to
study chimpanzees in Tanzania, Dian
Fossey to live with mountain gorillas in
Rwanda, and Biruté Galdikas to observe
orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. The
three women, who became known as
the Trimates, went on to complete
groundbreaking research.
When Galdikas first entered Tanjung
Puting National Reserve in 1971, orang-
utans were thought to be difficult—if
not impossible—to study. More soli-
tary than other primates, they roamed
over large areas of dense tree canopy.
But before long, Galdikas could spot
them in the wild and even get close
enough to interact with them. She
transformed her home into a “half-
way house” for animals transitioning
out of captivity and raised the orphans
almost as her own children, according
to a 1975 cover story that she wrote for
National Geographic.
During the first four years of
research and nearly 7,000 hours of
observation, Galdikas made major
discoveries about orangutans in the
wild—gathering details about their
diets, travel patterns, and relation-
ships. Crucially, she raised an alarm
over the deforestation that was fueling
the rapid loss of their habitats.
Nearly 50 years later Galdikas is still
in the field, making her work one of the
longest continuous studies of a single
species ever conducted.
Biruté Galdikas’s almost
50-year study of wild orang-
utans in Indonesia revealed
their social lives and habits.
RODNEY BRINDAMOUR
TRAILBLAZERS 129
Marion
Stirling
Push
1911-2001
In a photograph taken
during an expedition
to Panama in 1948,
Marion Stirling gazes
at a recently discov-
ered necklace made of
some 800 human teeth.
Her life had certainly
changed since 1931,
when she took a job
in Washington, D.C., as
secretary for Matthew
Stirling, director of the
Smithsonian’s Bureau of
American Ethnology.
Marion and Matthew
were married a few
years later, and Marion
began taking night
classes in anthropology
and geology. In 1938,
while on a family trip
to Mexico, Matthew,
who would come to be
known in the industry
as “the golden shovel,”
went to see a giant
stone sculpture that
explorers had found
decades earlier. It was a
colossal Olmec head.
Matthew obtained
funding from the
Smithsonian Institu-
tion and National Geo-
graphic to excavate the
area. On more than a
dozen expeditions to
southern Mexico (Mar-
ion missed one to give
birth to their daugh-
ter), the pair essentially
rewrote Mesoamerican
history. They unearthed
stone heads and
other remnants of the
ancient Olmec Empire,
determining it was
likely the region's first
great civilization.
130 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Marion supervised
the scorpion-infested
camp, and she cleaned
and cataloged their
findings. She co-
authored many papers
with Matthew and, in
1939, calculated that a
calendar carved into
an Olmec monument
referred to the year
31B.C., making it the
oldest date recorded
in the New World at
the time.
The Stirlings later
discovered pre-
Columbian jade in
Mexico, granite spheres
in Costa Rica, and
mounds built at Pana-
manian village sites.
Marion, who married
again after Matthew's
death, served twice
as the president of
the Society of Woman
Geographers. In 1975
she was awarded its
gold medal for pioneer-
ing contributions to
archaeology in Mexico
and Central America.
Marion Stirling (left) and her
husband, Matthew, excavated
pieces that rewrote Meso-
american history during their
expeditions to Mexico in
the 1930s and ‘40s. Here she
applies a coat of varnish to
protect an ancient skull
from crumbling.
RICHARD H. STEWART
On their way to break the
record for transcontinental
flight, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh and her husband,
Charles (above), pose at
a California airfield in 1930.
The newlyweds took off and
landed in New York 14 hours,
23 minutes, 32 seconds later.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
ANNE
MORROW
LINDBERGH
1906-2001
First woman in the
U.S. to earn a glider
pilot license; first
woman to receive a
National Geographic
Hubbard Medal
Anne Morrow’s first date with Charles
Lindbergh was in an airplane over Long
Island in 1928. Her suitor had just made
the first nonstop transatlantic flight
and was arguably the most famous
man in the world. Three months after
their wedding, Anne made her first solo
flight. In 1930 she was the first woman
in the U.S. to earn a first-class glider
pilot’s license.
That year Charles and Anne flew
from Los Angeles to New York in 14
hours and 23 minutes, breaking the
transcontinental speed record. Anne
was co-pilot, radio operator, naviga-
tor—and seven months pregnant. Then
they flew to Japan, where Anne set a
record for long-distance radio commu-
nication. She gained recognition as an
aviator and author, and in 1934 she was
the first woman awarded National Geo-
graphic’s Hubbard Medal, for flights
totaling 40,000 miles.
By then, the couple’s lives had
darkened. In 1932 their infant son
had been kidnapped and murdered.
Then Charles became enamored of
Germany’s technological advances. He
accepted a medal from the Nazi regime
and became a vocal opponent of the
US. entering World War II. Anne wrote
a book in support of isolationism and
called fascism the “wave of the future.”
The once adoring public—and
Anne’s own mother—turned against
the couple. In later interviews and pub-
lished diaries, Anne regretted their
stance, which she described as being
mostly her husband’s. “My marriage
has stretched me out of my world,
changed me so it is no longer possi-
ble to change back,” she wrote. She
found redemption through writing.
In 1955 she released Gift From the Sea,
a reflection on women’s lives that was
lauded as a feminist manifesto and
topped best-seller lists.
In 1979, five years after Charles’s
death, Anne was inducted into the
National Aviation Hall of Fame. She
lived another 22 years, editing and
writing in seclusion in Connecticut.
TRAILBLAZERS _ 131
DICKEY CHAPELLE
1919-1965
Fearless National Geographic
photojournalist who covered
WWII through the Vietnam
War; first female American war
correspondent killed in combat
No amount of firepower
could keep Dickey Chapelle
away from war. In her photo
(below) from the Vietnam
War, an inferno flushes Viet-
cong soldiers from a hut in the
Mekong Delta. Chapelle cov-
ered dozens of conflicts. She
died from wounds suffered
when she was with marines
on patrol in Vietnam.
GEORGE F. MOBLEY (TOP);
DICKEY CHAPELLE
In 1959 Dickey Chapelle prepared to
leap off a tower. The pioneering war
correspondent was accompanying the
U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division
in Kentucky and, at 41 years old, was
parachuting for the first time. She was
terrified. But fear never lasted long for
Chapelle. She proclaimed parachuting
as among “the greatest experiences
one can have.”
By then, Chapelle had reported on
dozens of conflicts, including World
War II. She’d been held in solitary
confinement during the Hungarian
uprising and was the first journalist
accredited by the Algerian rebels.
Fidel Castro called her “the polite lit-
tle American with all that tiger blood
in her veins.” After training with the
Screaming Eagles, she became the only
woman at the time authorized to jump
with combat paratroopers in Vietnam.
Born Georgette Meyer, Chapelle took
the nickname Dickey from her hero,
Arctic explorer Adm. Richard Byrd. She
dreamed of being a pilot or aerospace
engineer. At 14, she sold her first article
to U.S. Air Services magazine; at 16,
she enrolled at MIT. She married Tony
Chapelle in 1940.
The couple began writing and pho-
tographing stories for National Geo-
graphic in the 1950s, but after they
separated, Dickey took on both roles.
Pinning Vietnamese paratrooper and
U.S. Army parachutist badges to her
bush hat, she ventured where other
reporters didn’t dare go. If her pres-
ence was a novelty, it didn’t grant
her special treatment. “Not once has
a general ever offered to trade me
a SECRET operations order for my
fair white virtue,” she wrote to her
publisher. She named her autobiog-
raphy What’s a Woman Doing Here?
after a refrain she often heard on
the battlefield.
“There’s no question” that war is
no place for a woman, Chapelle once
told an interviewer. “There’s only one
other species on Earth for whom a
war zone is no place, and that’s men.”
In 1962 Chapelle became the sec-
ond woman to receive the George
Polk Memorial Award, the highest
citation for bravery from the Overseas
Press Club of America. She’d seen
more fighting in Vietnam than any
other American—17 operations in all.
But her conflict tally would end there.
On November 4, 1965, Chapelle
was on a Marine mission near the
coastal city of Chu Lai. About 8 a.m.
the patrol unit walked into trip wire,
which triggered a grenade that was
wired to a mortar. Chapelle was hit in
the neck by shrapnel. She died on the
floor of a helicopter—the first female
American correspondent to die in
combat. Years later, other journalists
reported that Vietnamese Airborne
troops still reminisced about the
small, foul-mouthed woman who'd
once jumped with them.
TRAILBLAZERS 133
or the first century of National Geographic, the few female explorers, photogra-
phers, and scientists in its pages were almost always white and American or
European. Today’s community of explorers and contributors is as diverse as the
places, people, and species they study. But even in 2020, many of them—Asha de
Vos, for example, the only Sri Lankan marine mammal biologist with a Ph.D.—are a rarity in
their chosen profession. Here are some of the explorers representing National Geographic and
clearing the path for another generation of adventurous women.
Jess
Cramp
Born 1979
Marine biologist who
helped create one of
the world’s largest
shark sanctuaries
Before becoming the
first Sri Lankan Ph.D.
marine mammal biolo-
gist, Asha de Vos imag-
ined “seeing things no
one else would ever
see and going where
no one else would ever
go.” Years later that
dream put her ona
ship in the North Indian
134 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
In the Cook Islands,
where she lives, Jess
Cramp is often the only
woman aboard when
she does research
from commercial fish-
ing boats. As a marine
biologist focused on
sharks, earning the
respect of the crew is
crucial to her scientific
success. Long before
Cramp made it onto a
boat, she struggled to
find female mentors in
the competitive field.
She helped create one
of the world’s largest
shark sanctuaries, in
the South Pacific, but
says she still hears the
words “You don’t look
ike a scientist” far too
often. “We can’t answer
the world's toughest
questions with the sta-
ri
tus quo,” Cramp says.
Asha
de Vos
Born 1978
Pioneer of whale
research in the
North Indian Ocean
Ocean, where she began
to study blue whales.
“As women, we have
to work harder than
men,” she says. “Work so
hard that people stop
seeing you for your
gender or background,
but instead they see
you for your capacity
to do what you do.”
RAE WYNN-GRANT
Born 1985
Ecologist studying conflict be-
tween people and large carnivores
“Often I show up to places, and
people don’t believe me when I say
I'm Dr. Wynn-Grant,” says Rae Wynn-
Grant, whois the only African-American
large-carnivore ecologist with a Ph.D.
in the United States.
Nature programs on TV were her
gateway into conservation, even
though the hosts were “very different
from me—often older, white, British
or Australian men who seemed to have
grown up in the outdoors.” Wynn-Grant
didn’t go on her first hike until age 20,
but since then she has honed her out-
door survival skills in fieldwork around
the world. She studies human-carnivore
conflict with grizzly bears in Yellow-
stone National Park, lions in Kenya
and Tanzania, and black bears in the
American Great Basin. She does it, she
says, to build a world that’s “thriving,
healthy, and balanced.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT, THIS PAGE: ANDY MANN; TSALANI LASSITER; SPENCER LOWELL
OPPOSITE PAGE: ELIZABETH DALZIEL; JACKIE FAHERTY; IAN BALAM; THEODORA RICHTER
Ella
AlI-Shamahi
Born 1983
Anthropologist
researching Neander-
thals in unstable and
disputed territories
One roll of film in a high
school class hooked
Evgenia Arbugaeva,
now an acclaimed
documentarian of the
Russian Arctic. “In
photography | instantly
saw an endless potential
in capturing and telling
stories, the beauty
of total immersion in
the moment and at the
same time creative
control of it,” she says.
Liliana
Gutierrez
Mariscal
Born 1976
Biologist
empowering women
in coastal Mexico
Ella Al-Shamahi digs for
Neanderthal fossils in
Iraq, Yemen, and other
countries. The paleoan-
thropologist-stand-up
comic can laugh off
reactions from those
surprised by a female
scientist working in
conflict zones, but she
worries that a gender
imbalance in her field
dissuades young girls
from entering it. So she
has been ona mission
to highlight accom-
plished women both on
social media and in aca-
demia. “I’m aware I'ma
minority. I’m aware that
| need to represent,”
she says. “At times that
feels like a burden but
one | feel honored to
be burdened with.”
=
Evsenia
Arbusaeva
Born 1985
Photographer
exploring life in the
Russian Arctic
To fully understand
her isolated subjects,
Arbugaeva spends
months or years
absorbed in life on the
tundra. Her projects
include a look at her
Arctic hometown.
“In the field | ask
myself: Have | given the
maximum of myself to
it?” she says. “I try to
reach a point of a clean
conscience about this.”
‘MUNAZZA ALAM
Born 1994
Astrophysicist seeking
Earthlike planets
Munazza Alam is searching for the
Earth’s twin. This planet, which would
be cool enough to have liquid water,
is theoretical, but Alam, a graduate
student at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics, pores over
telescopic data in hopes of finding it.
Growing up in New York City, Alam
didn’t pay much attention to space.
Then, as a teenager, she saw the Milky
Way for the first time on a trip to the
Kitt Peak National Observatory in
Arizona. Now the atmospheres of
exoplanets are the subject of her
academic fascination.
Entering the field wasn’t easy.
“I am usually the only person who
looks like me in a room full of astron-
omers,” she says. “Since Iam some-
times my own worst critic, I have had
to work extra hard to show myself
that Iam capable and that I belong
in astronomy.”
| If one of us makes it,
we all will. This is a
common saying among
women in El Manglito,
a Mexican fishing
village where biologist
Liliana Gutiérrez works.
“Inside their commu-
nities,” says Gutiérrez,
that invests in fishery
restoration in Mexico
and now works with
female leaders to
protect the ocean and
uplift their coastal
towns. “They truly
and deeply under-
stand the connection
women “see the whole
picture.” She helped
found an organization
between children,
education, and the
health of oceans.”
TRAILBLAZERS 135
INSTAGRAM
MICHAELA SKOVRANOVA
IMAGES FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS
WHO
A photojournalist based in
Australia, Skovranova special-
izes in stories of humans and
the environment.
WHERE
Cabbage Tree Bay Aquatic
Reserve near Sydney, Australia
WHAT
Taken with an Olympus E-M5
Mark Il and 9-18mm lens in
an underwater housing
There can be magic in photographing women.
Skovranova, who contributes to the @natgeo Ins-
tagram account, says she is enchanted by the com-
bination of strength, playfulness, and camaraderie
she sees in women; it’s a chemistry that often yields
warm and inspiring photos. An environmental pho-
tographer specializing in underwater scenes who
likes to free dive—that is, hold her breath rather
than use a breathing apparatus—Skovranova was
swimming one day off Sydney’s Shelly Beach. She
watched a group of young women dive gleefully
under the waves, laughing and cavorting together.
“T feel like this gentle encouragement and playful-
ness is a beautiful part of womanhood,” she says.
This page showcases images from National Geographic's Instagram accounts. We're the most popular
brand on Instagram, with more than 127 million followers; join them at instagram.com/natgeo.
136 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
TRAVEL WITH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
NAT OVA (ol Melats] R@I~rele]f-] eal (end e\-rellulelau xe] cele) are(-cen akelelm (le l-\a aelm-).<e)e)c-1u(e)armaal=
promise of an authentic travel experience, and a commitment to giving back. With
unique travel experiences that aim to inspire people to care about the planet, and
access to National Geographic's grantees and active research sites, our travellers go
110 lada\-lar-lave Ke(-\-)e\-yameal-l1m dareyyy(-1e le [Nem dalton Vel ale p
NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
EXPEDITIONS
© 2019 National Geographic Partners, LLC. National Geographic EXPEDITIONS and the Yellow Border Design are trademarks of the National Geographic Society, used under license.
&
Blanding’s Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii)
Size: Carapace length, 15 - 28 cm Weight: 750 - 1,400 g Habitat: Swamps, marshes, ponds and
slow-moving streams Surviving number: Unknown
oS 5 ENTE ——s
“—_-
——
&»
Photographed by Alan Bartels
WILDLIFE AS CANON SEES IT
Built to last. Living to the venerable age of 77 or more
in the wild, Blanding’s turtle is armored from life’s
blows by a sturdy carapace. When the weather is
warm, it lies on a log to soak up the sun; when the
mercury drops, it can endure up to three months
submerged under ice. But future generations have
the odds stacked against them since nearly 80% of
global.canon
nests are depredated, mainly by raccoons. Habitat is
being lost and degraded as human settlements — and
with them, more ravening raccoons — draw nearer.
As Canon sees it, images have the power to raise
awareness of the threats facing endangered species
and the natural environment, helping us make the
world a better place.
-«
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